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Did Columbus bring Syphilis to Europe?
The most familiar theory suggests that syphilis came to the Europe in 1495, three years after Columbus set sail for what proved to be the New World.

Harper and her colleagues tried to track the evolution of syphilis by examining genes from it and other diseases related to the pathogen known as Treponema.

The researchers looked at 21 genetic regions in strains of the pathogen from 26 parts of the world. Treponema causes syphilis and a disease known as yaws, a "flesh-eating" infection of the joints, bones and skin found in tropical regions.

But yaws first appeared not in the New World but in the Old World, Harper said.

Yaws appeared in Africa and eventually made its way to South America and the New World as humans migrated. Then the germs made their way to Europe with the help of sailors and may have evolved into the venereal disease known as syphilis, perhaps because of different environmental conditions.

Europeans brought measles and smallpox (to the Indians). But this is an example of disease going the other way. That seems kind of fair."
What would this mean? We need to see Mankind as one and where man in any one part suffers under some local disease like tropical yaws would undergo changes over a period and affect other parts as well. We have seen the ugly side of giant pharmaceutical companies, which deny the Third World nations free use of anti-retoviral drugs to fight the scourge there. To them profit comes always come first.
benny

The findings are published in the Jan. 15 issue of the Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases.