Beware of “Visitors” bearing Salmonella

Ewen Callaway recently wrote in Nature: “Collapse of Aztec society linked to catastrophic salmonella outbreak.”

One of the worst epidemics in human history, a sixteenth-century pestilence that devastated Mexico’s native population, may have been caused by a deadly form of Salmonella from Europe, a studies suggest.

In one study, researchers say they have recovered DNA of the stomach bacterium from burials in Mexico linked to a 1540s epidemic that killed up to 80% of the country’s native inhabitants.

This is potentially the first genetic evidence of the pathogen that caused the massive decline in native populations after European colonization.

In 1519, when forces led by Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés arrived in Mexico, the native population was estimated at about 25 million. A century later, after a Spanish victory and a series of epidemics, numbers had plunged to around 1 million.

The largest of these disease outbreaks were known as cocoliztli (from the word for ‘pestilence’ in Nahuatl, the Aztec language). Two major cocoliztli, beginning in 1545 and 1576, killed an estimated 7 million to 18 million people living in Mexico’s highland regions.

“In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches,” noted a Franciscan historian who witnessed the 1576 outbreak.

1. Vågene, Å. J.et al. Preprint on bioRxiv at http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/106740 (2017).
2. Acuna-Soto, R.,Stahle, D. W., Cleaveland, M. K. & Therrell, M. D.  Infect. Dis. 8, 360–362(2002).
3. Zhou, Z.et al. Preprint on bioRxiv at http://doi.org/10.1101/105759 (2017).

Salmonella sickens nearly 1.5 Million of us yearly in the United States.

Republished with permission from Bill Marler and Marler Clark. Copyright (c) Marler Clark LLP, PS. All rights reserved.