Why did so many people have syphilis up until recent times?
The disease wasnt recognized until around 1500 C.E. in Europe and the awareness of germs as a cause was not present. People from one town blamed it on those from another, or from one area of Europe blamed it on other countries or areas. Simply put, people didnt know how to avoid contracting syphilis until the germ theory of disease became accepted. Syphilis also shows very ambiguous symptoms in its first stages, allowing someone who has it to dismiss the sores (chancres) as just another sore or pimple. Syphilis sores (chancres) on the lip. Very innocuous! One hypothesis said that explorers like Columbus brought syphilis back from the new world and another says that it was always in Europe and Asia but just not recognized as syphilis, especially since there are other related diseases, yaws and bejus, caused by bacteria of the same genus as Treponema pallidum. This led to more speculation that these diseases were brought from the old world to the new and then mutated into syphilis there. A recent study by paleopathologists Bruce and Christine Roshchild concludes that it began in the new world: they examined 687 skeletons from archaeological sites in the United States and Ecuador ranging in age from 400 to 6,000 years. Populations to the south (New Mexico, Florida, and Ecuador) proved to have syphilis, while those to the north (Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia) had yaws. By contrast, examination of 1,000 Old World skeletons dated to before contact with the New World revealed no cases of syphilis. This suggests that syphilis was first present in the New World and was later brought to the Old World. Furthermore, the Rothschilds found that the earliest yaws cases in the New World collections were at least 6,000 years old, while the first syphilis cases were at least 800 years old and perhaps more than 1,600 years old. This suggests that syphilis may be a New World mutation of yaws, which has a worldwide distribution. The occurrence of the same mutation giving rise to syphilis independently in the New and Old worlds seems unlikely. (1) Yaws and Bejel can be contracted by sharing drinks or kissing, while syphilis is almost always contracted through sex. The exception would be the transmission of the disease from an infected mother to her infant. Origins of Syphilis