Chinese-Flu, Kung-Flu and now Trump-Flu, according to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, but now, amid all these politicized pseudonyms for the coronavirus during the current epidemic, a new scientist Se He has published an article about a former micro-killer that could be called the “Viking Killer Disease”.
The team of researchers at St John’s College, Cambridge University discovered extinct strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons that prove for the first time that killerpox disease haunted humanity’s growth trajectory for at least 1,400 years. .
The researchers isolated viral DNA from human teeth and bones, such as this 1,200-year-old smallpox-infected Viking skeleton discovered in Öland, Sweden. ( The Swedish National Heritage Board / Science News )
A murderous stowaway hidden within international travelers
The new article by an international team of researchers was published in Science and it is part of a long-term project that sequences 5000 ancient human genomes and their associated pathogens. This particular gene sequencing project focused on ancient strains of the smallpox virus extracted from the teeth of Viking skeletons unearthed in northern Europe. The team of researchers found smallpox, caused by the variola virus, at 11 Viking-era burial sites in Denmark, Norway, Russia, the United Kingdom, and multiple human remains on Öland, an island on the east coast of Sweden.
Professor Eske Willerslev of St John’s College, Cambridge University, who led the new study, explained that smallpox spread from person to person through infectious droplets and that it killed “one third of the sick and left another third behind. permanently scarred or blind. ” The document reveals that around 300 million people died from the disease during the 20th century before it was officially eradicated in 1980 thanks to the deployment of a global vaccine. This represents the first human disease that the human race successfully eradicated.
The professor said his team already knew the Vikings were moving through Europe and beyond, but now they are known to have smallpox. In the same way that people are spreading Covid-19 during the coronavirus pandemic by traveling around the world on airplanes, “Vikings spread smallpox” because of their extensive sea voyage. The researchers conclude that the 1,400-year-old genetic information gleaned from the Viking’s teeth is “enormously significant because it teaches us about the evolutionary history of the variola virus that caused smallpox.”
The genetic sequencing project focused on ancient strains of the smallpox virus extracted from the teeth of Viking skeletons unearthed in northern Europe to show the evolution of the smallpox genome from the Viking era. ( Múhlemann et al. / Sciences )
Genetic sequencing provides evidence of smallpox in Vikings
Historians believe that smallpox may have existed from 10,000 BC, but no scientific evidence of the virus has been found since before the 17th century. While scientists are still unclear how Smallpox first infected humans, as Covid-19 is believed to have leaped from an animal population. Professor Martin Sikora, one of the lead authors who led the study, from the Center for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen, said the timeline for the occurrence of smallpox has always been unclear, but when sequencing the earliest strain Known from the killer virus “We first proved that smallpox existed during the Viking era.”
The researchers also say that there are very likely to be epidemics long before their published findings, and while they don’t know for sure if these smallpox strains were fatal and killed the Vikings, “they certainly died with smallpox in their blood flow so that we can detect it until 1400 years later “.
Smallpox was an infectious disease that killed around 300 million people in the 20 th just a century, before it was officially eradicated in 1980 thanks to a global vaccine. ( Robert Carswell / CC BY 4.0 )
Unexpected discovery of smallpox overrides virology assumptions
Dr. Terry Jones, one of the lead authors who led the study, a computational biologist based at the Charité Institute of Virology – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Center for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge, said neither team He hoped to find evidence that these smallpox strains existed. According to Dr. Jones, smallpox was long believed to be circulating in western and southern Europe in 600 AD. Thanks to these new findings, it has been scientifically proven that smallpox was also widespread in northern Europe and that “it is believed that returning crusaders or other subsequent events brought smallpox to Europe first, but these theories may not be correct” in light of this new news. study.
Dr. Jones added that archaeological knowledge of the past can “protect us in the present.” Mutations can reappear or spread from the animal reservoir, “so there will always be another zoonosis,” referring to an outbreak of infectious disease caused by a pathogen leaping from a non-human animal to a human. And although smallpox was eradicated forty years ago, scientists warn that another strain of smallpox could spill out of the animal reservoir “tomorrow.”
Top image: Researchers have discovered extinct strains of smallpox, an infectious disease also known as Variola, in the teeth of Viking skeletons proving that the disease existed at least 1,400 years ago. Source: nobeastsofierce / Adobe Stock
By Ashley Cowie
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