All articles tagged with #treponemal disease
New analysis of three ancient Vietnamese children's remains (4,100–3,300 years old) from Man Bac and An Son shows signs of congenital treponematosis, likely non-venereal forms such as yaws, suggesting maternal-to-child transmission could occur outside syphilis and prompting reevaluation of how treponemal diseases origins are understood and how skeletal evidence is interpreted in archaeology.
A new study published in the journal Nature used paleopathology techniques on 2,000-year-old bones unearthed in Brazil to recover the earliest known genomic evidence of Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis, suggesting that the disease may have originated in the Americas and was present long before the first trans-Atlantic contacts. The findings challenge the long-standing theory that syphilis emerged in Europe after Columbus' expeditions, indicating a more complex and ancient history of the disease's evolution and global distribution.