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Salmonella Probably Killed the Aztecs (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In 1545 disaster struck Mexico's Aztec nation when people started coming down with high fevers, headaches and bleeding from the eyes, mouth and nose. Death generally followed in three or four days. Within five years as many as 15 million people -- an estimated 80% of the population -- were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named "cocoliztli." The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language. Its cause, however, has been questioned for nearly 500 years. On Monday scientists swept aside smallpox, measles, mumps, and influenza as likely suspects, identifying a typhoid-like "enteric fever" for which they found DNA evidence on the teeth of long-dead victims.
Scientists now say they have probably unmasked the culprit. Analysing DNA extracted from 29 skeletons buried in a cocoliztli cemetery, they found traces of the salmonella enterica bacterium, of the Paratyphi C variety. It is known to cause enteric fever, of which typhoid is an example. The Mexican subtype rarely causes human infection today. Many salmonella strains spread via infected food or water, and may have travelled to Mexico with domesticated animals brought by the Spanish, the research team said. The study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Scientists now say they have probably unmasked the culprit. Analysing DNA extracted from 29 skeletons buried in a cocoliztli cemetery, they found traces of the salmonella enterica bacterium, of the Paratyphi C variety. It is known to cause enteric fever, of which typhoid is an example. The Mexican subtype rarely causes human infection today. Many salmonella strains spread via infected food or water, and may have travelled to Mexico with domesticated animals brought by the Spanish, the research team said. The study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
This post is at -1. I only see it because I have a low threshold explicitly configured, most people won't. That said, your post is at 0, so by replying to it you've increased the number of people who see it.
It's easy to be in favour of censoring people that you disagree with, the problem is that the censor is going to be a human making judgement calls. Most of us agree that censoring child pornography is fine, but the group charged with doing that in the UK managed to block Wikipedia because it contains a picture of an album cover that contains a naked child. So, if you want to censor racist posts, who do you want to give the authority to decide what is racist and what isn't to? If you can't name an individual, then there's a simple solution: log in and use your mod points.
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