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Study: Seals Infected Early Americans With Tuberculosis
mdsolar writes that a study suggests that tuberculosis first appeared in the New World less than 6,000 years ago and it was brought here by seals. After a remarkable analysis of bacterial DNA from 1,000-year-old mummies, scientists have proposed a new hypothesis for how tuberculosis arose and spread around the world. The disease originated less than 6,000 years ago in Africa, they say, and took a surprising route to reach the New World: it was carried across the Atlantic by seals. The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has already provoked strong reactions from other scientists. "This is a landmark paper that challenges our previous ideas about the origins of tuberculosis," said Terry Brown, a professor of biomolecular archaeology at the University of Manchester. "At the moment, I'm still in the astonished stage over this."
That place is trying to kill us off, for sure.
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She told me she was a mermaid!!
They'll figure out a way to still blame white people.
Oh, here it is: Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes reveal seals as a source of New World human tuberculosis (Paywall -- free Nature summary article here).
Modern strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from the Americas are closely related to those from Europe, supporting the assumption that human tuberculosis was introduced post-contact. This notion, however, is incompatible with archaeological evidence of pre-contact tuberculosis in the New World. Comparative genomics of modern isolates suggests that M. tuberculosis attained its worldwide distribution following human dispersals out of Africa during the Pleistocene epoch, although this has yet to be confirmed with ancient calibration points. Here we present three 1,000-year-old mycobacterial genomes from Peruvian human skeletons, revealing that a member of the M. tuberculosis complex caused human disease before contact. The ancient strains are distinct from known human-adapted forms and are most closely related to those adapted to seals and sea lions. Two independent dating approaches suggest a most recent common ancestor for the M. tuberculosis complex less than 6,000 years ago, which supports a Holocene dispersal of the disease. Our results implicate sea mammals as having played a role in transmitting the disease to humans across the ocean.
Germs don't care>
They're as fair as they can be, equal opportunity infection agents.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But seals are sooooo cute! You just have to pet them with that blubbery body and cute whiskers and big, black eyes.
We have already undertaken an effort to eradicate the seals. We have found that the most efficient means involves hunters with clubs.
Have gnu, will travel.
Defund the navy seals! No budget for you.
Dying whales have a tendency to beach themselves. There have been cases of beached whales being pulled back into the sea and then they go strait into the beach again where later autopsies reveal terminal illnesses. Now this article says that lung infecting bacteria travelled across the ocean in mammals. I'm no seal expect, but if dying seals "beach" themselves like whales, bacteria will have an easier time finding land based mammals (humans) to spread to.
Staving humans might have been interested in a seal, which didn't try to flee, which can explain the contact, but how did it spread to seals in the first place? and how did contaminated seals manage to cross an ocean? and can we be sure that it was seals and not whales or something other animals?
so all that clubbing was retroactively justified.
http://www.christmasseals.org/history.html
See why we hunt them here in Canada?
What clubbing are you talking about?
Did U.S. Navy special ops engage in biological warfare?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
There is evidence for human canine transmission of TB http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/artic... and dogs were kept in the Americas so the transmission path could have involved another animal in addition to seals.
mycobacterium spp. are extremely common in soil these days. And where did we get this skeleton 1000 year old skeleton? Oh right....out of the dirt. I'ld rather support the notion that TB spread a bit more recently and through a vector different then harp seals...perhaps during the slave trade and colonial expansion eras? hince the huge literary references to consumption in the victorian days... I remember being taught as a grade school child that european diseases obliterated huge swaths of the native american population. So, I'ld expect TB being rather nasty would have been pretty darn bad in the mosquito laden vector swamps that we called South/North america pre-DDT.
Of course....maybe seals swam across the ocean and were the idea vector. (of course I dunno, this is why I flip burgers with my STEM degree)
How do you change SEAL into COAT in just four moves?
SEAL :D
CLUB
CLUB
CLUB
COAT
look, I'm just going to drop in and say that there's a loose scientific consensus on all kinds of pre-Columbian contact with the Western Hemisphere
that said, it would be odd if it was seals not humans
Thank you Dave Raggett
Even my car engine was ruined by a bad seal.
. It shouldn't be a surprise that other animals could be a vector.
The pasteurization of milk didn't come into practice until the late 1800s. Back then, tuberculosis was commonly carried by milk. A low-temperature, long-time (LTLT) process, also known as batch pasteurization, was first developed to kill the tuberculosis pathogen. The incidence of tuberculosis contracted from milk fell dramatically, and in fact it no longer makes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's list of foodborne illnesses
Consumption be done about it? Of cough, of cough.
It's not the cough that carries you off. It's the coffin they carry you off in.
Thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
The disease originated less than 6,000 years ago
Well duhhh. To be any older than that, it would have been around before the Earth existed.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
What's the nautical speed velocity of an unladen seal?