Extract

The relationship between travel and STIs is not new.1 This became obvious after Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492. According to historical data, some of his troops came back in 1493 with syphilis. The first descriptions of syphilis are attributed to Torrella in 1497 and Villalobos in 1498, in Spain.2 And two privileged witnesses, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdès (1478–1557) in the ‘Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias’ (1526) and Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) in the ‘Brevἰsima relación de la destrucción de las Indias’ (1539–1552), supported the New World origin of syphilis.2

As travel medicine specialists know well, mass gatherings amplify epidemics.1 And this is exactly what happened with the spread of syphilis after the siege of Naples in Italy (1495). The Spanish confronted the French in the Castel Nuovo, and after the siege, soldiers, mostly mercenaries and sex workers, disseminated syphilis all over Europe.2 So far, no serious data have challenged this New World hypothesis. Nowadays, hybridization capture and sequencing are developing rapidly in archaeological material. Such studies show that a variety of strains related to both venereal syphilis and yaws-causing Treponema pallidum subspecies were present in Northern Europe in the Early Modern Era. This was not been demonstrated for venereal syphilis before Columbus came back from the Americas. Thus, the current phylogenic approach supports the New World origin of syphilis.2

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