Timothy Birdnow

It's now confirmed by genetic testing; syphillis is an American export to Europe and not something Columbus gave to the Native Americans.

FTA:

"When a mysterious flesh-rotting disease broke out in Europe in 1495, two years after Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas, suspicion fell on his crew.

Syphilis was soon rampant across the Continent and beyond, but its origins continued to be fiercely debated, with some historians claiming it was actually home-grown.

Now, scientists have carried out genetic testing on the bones of infected people from Chile, Peru, Mexico and Argentina, who lived between the 13th and 15th centuries and died before Columbus arrived.

They found that ancestral forms of syphilis were present in the New World before it was discovered by Europeans, suggesting the bacterium did indeed hitch a lift back with the explorers.

"The data clearly support a root in the Americas for syphilis and its known relatives, and their introduction to Europe starting in the late 15th century is most consistent with the data,” said Kirsten Bos, group leader for molecular paleopathology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

"While indigenous American groups harboured early forms of these diseases, Europeans were instrumental in spreading them around the world.”

End

This has long been suspected by scientists who noted it's similarity to other diseases known in central and south America. But it's been an article of faith that the Europeans introduced it to the Indians because, well, we all know everything they did was evil and so they had to despoil paradise with their filthy lecher's disease.

In it's day syphillis was as dreaded and terrible as AIDS was in the '80's and '90's. There was no cure for it, although on rare occasions people went into permanent remission. But it gets into the nervous system and many of those in remission went insane from it.

Penicillin changed all that because it's a bacteria and is now easily treated (easily enough, anyway).

Now,it is true the Natives suffered from the arrival of Europeans as they were more susceptible to the European diseases. That makes perfect sense in that the Europeans were always coming into contact with other peoples, some from quite far away (like China or subsaharan Africa) and so their immune systems were better at dealing with novel infections. Also, the lack of cross-cultural trade in the Americas (for instance the Aztecs didn't even know of the Incans and vice-versa)which stemmed largely from a lack of proper pack animals and the Indians not inventing the wheel or any sort of ship capable of moving large numbers of people or cargo made the Americas isolated and as a result open to the new infections coming from the old world.

At any rate efforts to research the diseases transmitted to Europe have always failed primarily due to lack of interest by Academia and fear of a backlash by the Left, which has built it's whole worldview on the evils of Western culture.

Tehy are wrong as this shows.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 02:25 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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