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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.
If only they'd lived in dense cesspools of cities and dealt with zoonosis for a few hundred years, maybe they'd have had better immune systems.
Or at least killed as high a percentage of Europeans as they lost of their own.
I really do wonder, though... would the Old World folks have acted any differently if they'd understood that going to the New World would pretty much obliterate the locals through disease?
Everyone knows the story - the US government deliberately caused smallpox epidemics by distributing contaminated blankets. There's one problem: it isn't true. It was neither an act of terrorism nor an attempted genocide because it didn't happen. The entire story is a fraud, perpetrated by a former "ethnic studies" professor named Ward Churchill.
The High Plains Smallpox Epidemic of 1837 was caused by personal contact with infected passengers from the riverboat St. Peter's, owned by a fur trading company. The epidemic on the High Plains centered around Fort Clark which, despite the name, was not a military installation. It was a privately owned fur trading post. The boss of Fort Clark was Francis Chardon, a fur trader. His personal diary survived to this day, one of numerous eyewitness accounts preserved from the time.
Not only were infected blankets not distributed, but correspondence from Joshua Pilcher, the Indian Bureau's sub-agent to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Ponca at Fort Kiowa, just south of Fort Clark, to Mr. Chardon describes one particular problem interfering with attempts to contain the epidemic that is curiously relevant to today. A smallpox vaccine existed in 1837, but Mr. Pilcher noted "it is a verry delicate experiment among those wild Indians, because death from any other cause, while under the influence of Vaccination would be attributed to that + no other cause[.]"
In 2006, Ward Churchill was found guilty of seven counts of research misconduct by the University of Colorado Ethics Committee. He was fired in 2007. He promptly filed suit, and won a jury trial for wrongful dismissal. The jury followed the instructions to the letter in coming to their conclusion, but recognized Churchill for the lying shitheel he was and awarded him precisely $1.00. (One juror denied any such motivation in a public interview.) A judge vacated the jury verdict on the grounds that the (state) university enjoys quasi-judicial immunity. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal and in 2013 agreed with both the first judge and the Court of Appeals that the university was immune to suit in these circumstances. The US Supreme Court declined to get involved.
It took 19 years from when Churchill first published his fraudulent bullshit in 1994 to the time when the judicial system finished with the case. It could easily take four or five generations for his lie to finally exit the public consciousness. This despite the fact that humanity currently has the fastest, most ubiquitous communications systems in the history of the species.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I saw a TV documentary which blamed the same event on hantavirus. The story went that there were some very dry years, concentrating rodent populations in small areas where they all got infected with hantavirus.
Then, a rainy year came and the rodent population exploded faster than natural controls could kick in, and virtually all the rodents had hantavirus and spread it to the people. They also think that hantavirus mutated to become person-to-person contagious as well. There are actually weather records coincident with the events that supported this theory (the story goes).
The European population around at the time, because of greater genetic diversity, had significantly more resistance to it than the native populations, so the story went, and thus survived with more frequency.
--PM
Why do we need racism on Slashdot? Nobody would be disappointed if garbage like these posts was deleted. Occasionally the editors do delete posts, so there's no reason for them not to remove blatant racism. It's a shame that so many articles now are full of idiotic trolls. I enjoyed the old Slashdot trolls, who posted clever memes and stories. Sure, they were offtopic and sometimes offensive, but they were at least entertaining and clever. Posts like the parent, however, contribute absolutely nothing, and are downright offensive. If the editors would start deleting crap like the parent, perhaps the idiots would get the message and stop posting garbage like this. There are really several idiotic trolls already in this article, and along with terrible editing, they are driving off the actual nerds. There's no reason for posts like the parent to not he deleted.
>> 80% of the population -- were wiped out in an epidemic...salmonella enterica bacterium...spread via infected food or water...
So...the Aztecs were killed by Montezuma's revenge?
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.
My understanding is that salmonella is always around. To this day we periodically have outbreaks due to contamination. Why would it be more likely to have travelled to Mexico with domesticated animals brought by the Spanish rather than just come from the local environment? I have not seen any explanation of why it is more likely to have travelled to Mexico with domesticated animal.
I can't see how. The article was published on Jan 15th, 2018.
That should read....
I know it's crabby, but he's being a basshole, just for the halibut.
-- She drank like a......she drank a lot.
in 1763. (Not the US Government...but...)
AC misspelled Crappie, but was otherwise perfectly cromulent.
There are a lot of VERY odd and useful fish names. Get memorizing, and I'll come back next week with a test.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
"Nobody would be disappointed if garbage like these posts was deleted."
Censorship breeds supermemes as antibiotics create superbugs. The left tried to censor and shame racists, and it resulted in President Trump. If you are against racism, find better words. Censorship will make things worse.
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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To bring this back on topic for a geek site: can you tell the difference between real fish names and ones that come from a neural network?
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Unlike the ecologically friendly hunting that the natives did, where they would stampede an entire herd off a cliff. Or their green slash-and-burn agriculture.
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Indian tribes were hitting the buffalo pretty hard -for hides. It was market hunting that killed them. The actual slaughter was carried out in a pretty egalitarian way. White men were more efficient but there is a solid argument that with market conditions, buffalo would not have survived long simply due to Indian hunting. Of course, you would then blame the white man for the market itself.. and that isn't unfair but it doesn't exactly leave the tribes pristine.
That Salmonella bitch also killed a few residents of a local retirement home.
It's about time they catch her.
It is true that the bacterium discussed in the Nature, Evolution & Ecology paper discusses is of the genus Salmonella, but describing the disease that killed the Aztecs as being "salmonella" conveys the wrong information to the lay reader (or even the scientifically informed one) since this term is commonly used to describe food borne disease. There are several different pathogenic bacteria species, and subspecies, in the genus Salmonella. The infectious form of Salmonella enterica that is transmitted person-to-person is a different sub-species from ones that cause food poisoning and in this form is known as Paratyphoid Fever (similar to the related Typhoid Fever).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
That's awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Years ago I wrote some underwater adventures for a punny RPG, and I think I got lost in actual fish names for a good few hours. The variety and weirdness of what's out there is astonishing. Eventually I limited my own inventions to the things that people would mostly recognize, like a rabid dogfish, distempered catfish, mutant squidopus (9 arms), and a few others that, honestly, pale in comparison to some of the ones on the list.
There's an intriguing link at the bottom of the article, to a NaNoWriMo project about the first lines of novels. I tried following it, but my corporate web filter thinks it's fishy (heh, no pun intended). I may follow up at home.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
... the Spanish are off the hook for genocide then?
Having actually had typhoid fever that lasted 7 days before I was finally put on the proper medication, I can really empathize with a population that lived with such horrible illness. The vomiting, diarrhea, and a general sense that your bowels are being constantly twisted like a wet washcloth are just awful. Living with such symptoms until death finally takes you must have been horrific.