Did Columbus Bring It to Europe

In the late fourteen hundreds, a syphilis outbreak raged across Europe killing up to five million people. For centuries, Columbus was blamed for bringing the bacteria back from the New World.  But scientists have never found historical evidence of the bacteria in the Americas - until now. When studying two-thousand-year-old remains of a burial site in Brazil, infection on the bones suggested a syphilis-like illness.  

When scientists did a DNA analysis, they found the Treponema genome which is the bacterium that causes syphilis and several other diseases such as yaws and bejel.  They then got enough DNA to discover that the bacteria were similar to a modern-day subspecies of Treponema that causes bejel.  T. pallidum endemicum causes lesions of the skin and bones that begin in the mouth. Eventually it deforms the bones and face.  

But this doesn’t prove that Columbus brought syphilis back from the New World since the infection that spread in Europe was a sexually transmitted one. And scientists have since discovered that syphilis may have already been in Europe decades before Columbus’s return.   

One study found T. pallidum pallidum which is sexually transmitted in human remains in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands from the early modern period beginning in the early 1400’s.   

What this latest finding does tell us is that this is the earliest discovery of the Treponema bacteria in the world and that it may have first evolved to infect humans as far back as twelve thousand years ago.