With the pandemic past and vaccine-preventable infectious diseases creeping back, we don't think often about syphilis.
A new report in Science, from Davide Bozzi of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and colleagues, uses DNA evidence to rewrite what we thought we knew about how and when European explorers brought the sexually transmitted infection here. It turns out, they likely didn't.
The genome sequence from a recently-discovered sample of a close relative of the modern bacterium that causes syphilis, in Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia, backdates the origin of the STI in North America to much earlier than previously thought. So European explorers might have picked the STI up here and brought it home, where it spread in the late 15th century.
The bacterium Treponema pallidum causes syphilis, which belongs to a group of infectious diseases caused by spiral-shaped bacteria (spirochetes) that includes yaws, bejel, and pinta. People have suffered with these diseases for thousands of years, but evidence from human remains is sparse, because the bacteria crumble bones. Obtaining long enough DNA molecules to overlap them and deduce the genome sequence from ancient microbial pathogens has been difficult.
To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.