Did Columbus bring syphilis to Europe?

The most comprehensive genetic analysis conducted on the family of bacteria that cause syphilis suggests Columbus and his men introduced the disease into Renaissance Europe after contracting it during their voyage to the New World.

Kristin Harper, of Emory University in the US, used phylogenetics - the study of the evolutionary relatedness between organisms - to study 26 geographically disparate strains of treponemes. The venereal syphilis-causing strains originated most recently, and their closest relatives were strains collected in South America that cause the disease yaws.

“Syphilis was a major killer in Europe during the Renaissance,” said study co-researcher George Armelagos. “Understanding its evolution is important not just for biology, but for understanding social and political history. It could be argued that syphilis is one of the important early examples of globalisation and disease, and globalisation remains an important factor in emerging diseases.”

While it is generally agreed that the first recorded epidemic of syphilis occurred in Europe in 1495, controversy has raged ever since over the origin of the pathogen. Most of the evidence in recent years has come from bones of past civilisations in both New World and Old World sites, since chronic syphilis causes skeletal lesions. In many cases, however, skeletal analysis is inconclusive, due to problems with pinpointing the age of the bones and the lack of supporting epidemiological evidence.

One hypothesis is that a subspecies of Treponema from the warm, moist climate of the tropical New World mutated into the venereal, syphilis-causing subspecies to survive in the cooler and relatively more hygienic European environment.

The study, published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, indicated that yaws is an ancient infection in humans while venereal syphilis arose relatively recently. The results are especially significant due to the large number of different strains analysed, including two never-before-sequenced strains of yaws from isolated inhabitants of Guyana’s interior.