Columbus May Have Brought Syphilis to Europe
A new study blames the voyager's crew for the trans-Atlantic spread of the STD.
Jan. 15, 2008 — -- When Christopher Columbus sailed back from the New World after his historic 1492 voyage, he may have brought an enduring souvenir back with him.
So says a team of researchers who believe that syphilis first arrived in Europe on the Nina and the Pinta when Columbus and his men returned home in 1493.
The finding has so far been met with equal measures of titillation from the public and outrage from other researchers who say there is no way to conclusively make such a connection.
Still, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, say they have managed to draw this link through the first genetic attempt to understand the history and evolution of the disease.
"Most of the previous studies on this were based on skeletal evidence, so we were trying to approach this genetically," said the study's lead investigator Kristin Harper. "And what we found was that [syphilis] came from the New World to Old World pretty recently."
"When you put that together with other documented evidence that the first European epidemic of syphilis was in 1495, it goes along with Columbian hypothesis."
The Columbian theory noted by Harper purports that syphilis was present only in the New World before Columbus' voyages and he brought it back to Europe with his crews, leading to the first recorded outbreak of syphilis in the Old World in 1495.
The other theory is that syphilis was present in the Old World before Columbus' voyage, but the disease was misdiagnosed as leprosy.
However, only a few isolated cases of pre-Columbian syphilis in the Old World have been reported, and those cases have been met with intense criticism regarding the diagnosis, dating and epidemiological context of the findings.
The Emory researchers sought to put an end to the ongoing debate on the origins of the disease by tracking where and when each of the different strains of Treponema — the pathogen that causes syphilis — evolved.
What this latest research suggests is that only the nonsexually transmitted species of Treponema existed in the Old World before Columbus' voyage to America. Columbus therefore must have first introduced the sexually transmitted syphilis strain to Europe upon his return from America.
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