Did Columbus bring back disease?

The 18th-century philosopher Voltaire may have been right after all in blaming Christopher Columbus for the syphilis pandemic that ravaged Europe from the late 15th century, a study suggested on Tuesday.

The geographical source of one of the world's most lethal sexually-transmitted diseases has been hotly debated for half a millennium, and now research from a team in the United States points the finger at the explorer.

Syphilis was first recorded in 1495, among French-led mercenaries entering the Italian port city of Naples.

From there, it marched across Europe. By the end of the century, syphilis had become variously known as 'Spanyie pockis' in Scotland, as the Spanish malady in Flanders and Portugal, while Italians, Germans and the English referred to it as the Naples disease.

In 1493, Columbus returned from his historic first voyage to the New World.

'Cavorting with indigenous women'

Some historians of medicine believe that the mercenaries were among Columbus' crew and had picked up the disease from cavorting with indigenous women.

But the evidence for this is sketchy. Indeed, other experts suggest that syphilis originated in Europe and in fact was taken to the Americas by Columbus' men.

Now a new study based on phylogenetics — the science of evolutionary links between organisms — gives some scientific weight to the accusations of Voltaire and others who later pointed the finger at Columbus.

A team of researchers led by Kristin Harper of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia compared, in 26 places around the world, different strains of the family of bacteria called treponemes that cause syphilis and three related diseases.

They found that syphilis is the most recent member of the treponeme family to have evolved.

In genetic terms, syphilis is a close cousin of a tropical disease called yaws, endemic only in South America, which likewise affects the skin, bone and joints. Yaws, though, is milder than syphilis and is not transmitted through sex.

Hypothesis gains new strength

Harper's hypothesis is that members of Columbus' crew became infected with yaws. As the germ travelled, it swiftly adapted to the cooler, drier climates of Europe and later became the pathogen that causes syphilis, remaining largely stable ever since.

"When this genetic data is combined with extensive documentary evidence," the study says, "the Columbus hypothesis for syphilis' origin gains new strength".

Bolstering the argument, it says, is the absence of skeletal lesions on human remains in pre-Columbian Europe and North Africa.

Venereal syphilis, caused by the pallidum subspecies of Treponema pallidum, almost always leaves a signature of its ravages on bone matter.

Initially, says the study, T. pallidum rose in the Old World in the form of a non-venereal infection and then spread to the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Later — having mutated into yaws — it came to the New World.

The disease made its first return trip carried by European explorers, and then, in its newly virulent form, went back once again to the Americas and around the world.

The new paper is published in the online scientific journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Neglected Tropical Diseases.

In Voltaire's satirical work, 'Candide', the title character's congenitally-optimistic tutor, Pangloss, explains how syphilis arrived on Europe's shore, and why all the suffering it caused was justified.

"If Columbus had not caught, on an island in the Americas, this sickness which poisons the source of procreation... we would not have had chocolate," he says.

In the book, Pangloss himself loses an eye and an ear to the disease. Had he lived a couple of centuries later, he could have easily been cured with penicillin.

AFP

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