Italian Skeletons Reveal Old World Diseases

April 12, 2004 — Researchers investigating Italian cemeteries have found further evidence to confirm that syphilis and rheumatoid arthritis plagued the Americas long before the arrival of Columbus.

Involving various sites throughout Italy, the study examined 688 skeletons dating from the Bronze Age to the Black Plague epidemic of 1485-1486. The remains were investigated for the presence of bony alterations characteristic of rheumatoid arthritis, gout, spondyloarthropathy and syphilis-causing organisms, called treponemes.

Indeed, syphilis is known to scar and deform bones. Legend holds that Columbus and his crew contracted syphilis in the New World and caused an outbreak in Europe.

"Prior to Columbus, Italy was like a virgin. Rheumatoid arthritis and syphilis were not present, further supporting the contention that they are New World-derived diseases," Bruce Rothschild, the paleopathologist at the Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio who carried the study, told Discovery News.

The research matches Rothschild's previous studies, which found no evidence of syphilis in the Old World before Columbus. However, 687 skeletons from eight different populations in the New World, ranging in age from 400 to 6,000 years old, displayed signs of syphilis in bones that were at least 800 years old.

The examination of the Italian skeletons also dismissed the hypothesis that the demise of the Roman Empire was related to lead poisoning. Limiting evaluation to the Roman period, only two instances of gout, which is caused by lead poisoning, were found among 439 individuals, suggesting that the disease was uncommon at that time.

The most frequent bone alterations, indicating minor trauma, came from 15th century skeletons. According to Rothschild, this was a time of psychological stress caused by repetitive plagues, but also of unique physical injury.

"During times of plague, there is a tendency to retreat into one's home in order to reduce exposure to the epidemic. The skeletons showed that measures taken did not save those people from plague death, but might have increased exposure to minor injuries at home," Rothschild said.

The frequency of spondyloarthropathy, a family of inflammatory arthritic conditions, was significantly below that found in populations with bad sanitary conditions.

"This indicates a high, high standard of hygiene in ancient Italy. We should not be be surprised that the civilization that brought us aqueducts would have also solved sanitation," Rothschild said.

According to writer and historian Ruggero Marino, author of several books on Columbus, the hypothesis that the explorer and his crew contracted syphilis and caused an outbreak in Europe on their return is not confirmed by historical documents.

"I doubt this is the right explanation. However, a careful examination of Columbus' bones, supposing the explorer's real body is identified, could tell us more," Marino told Discovery News.

"....I've never read anyplace else that lead causes gout...."

I hadn't heard that either. Here's what medinfo.co.uk has to say about it:
Gout
Gout is a condition that most commonly causes a painful, red, swollen, hot joint or joints. It is caused by such high levels of a natural chemical (uric acid) in the blood (hyperuricaemia) that crystals begin to form.

Symptoms
Attacks may last a few days to a few weeks and usually there are long periods between attacks.

Mostly, one joint becomes painful, red, hot, and swollen (inflamed) over a very short time. Most often the first joint to be affected is the big toe, just like the popular image of the person with gout, but in up to a third of people the attack starts elsewhere. Sometimes more than one joint, or soft tissues (muscles, tendons, tissues below the skin) may be affected by inflammation.

Sometimes hard, yellowish lumps are visible close beneath the skin (tophi). Crystals may cause troubles elsewhere, sometimes leading to stones in the kidneys.

Causes
Uric acid is a natural substance, produced by the body as a by-product of the breakdown of old body cells, and from foods we eat. Most of it leaves the body via the kidneys, in the urine. Some is passed out in the bile.

Idiopathic gout
Most times the cause is inbuilt and not a direct result of drinking or eating the wrong things. Where no other cause is identified it is known as idiopathic gout. About 20% of people with idiopathic gout have relatives who have hyperuricaemia or gout. The inherited problem may be one of over-production or reduced elimination of uric acid via the kidneys.

Secondary gout
Certain other conditions, especially affecting the blood, and treatment with some cancer drugs, can cause higher levels of uric acid. Certain food products are high in uric acid (eg offal, meat extracts and fish roe), and alcohol causes increased levels, by producing another substance (lactic acid) which competes with uric acid for excretion.

Kidney failure can lead to high uric acid levels (hyperuricaemia) as can the use of "water tablets" (diuretics).

Diagnosis
Your doctor will be able to tell a lot from the speaking to and examining you. You may well also have a blood sample taken to test the uric acid level. Sometimes a sample of fluid from a swollen joint, or a crystal from one of the lumps near to the skin surface may be looked at under a microscope.

When gout has caused a lot of damage to a joint it may show up on an Xray, but this does not usually help with making the diagnosis in the first place.

Treatment
In an acute attack, the drugs most likely to be prescribed are the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) eg indomethacin. These are not usually used if the patient has a history of peptic ulcer or indigestion, or when the patient is on blood-thinning drugs (anti-coagulants), and in certain other cases. If the NSAIDs cannot be used, then your doctor may prescribe colchicine.

If you have a persistently elevated uric acid level and are having frequent attacks of gout, your doctor is likely to suggest the use of a regular preventative (prophylactic) treatment. The most likely suggestion is allopurinol, which is taken daily. This prevents the build-up of uric acid.

An alternative is the use of a drug which causes more uric acid to pass out through the kidneys (a uricosuric agent) eg probenecid.

Your doctor may well continue with the acute treatment when the prophylactic treatment is started, as this may, in itself, cause a flare-up.

Prevention

Avoid excesses of alcohol or food.
Lose weight if overweight.
Avoid offal, fish roe and meat extracts.
Books

Getting rid of Gout, by Bryan Emmerson

A guide to management and prevention.
(Buy online from amazon.co.uk, or amazon.com.)
How to Eat Away Arthritis, by Lauri Aesoph

Covers many useful dietary tips helpful in arthritis and gout.
(Buy online from amazon.co.uk, or amazon.com.)
Gout hater's cookbook, by Jodi Schneiter

Specific recipes for those wishing to minimise gout attacks.
(Buy online from amazon.com.)

at: http://www.medinfo.co.uk/conditions/gout.html

"...From what I've read, large amounts of lead have been found in the remains of Romans dependent on a lead plumbing system...."

The lead plumbing system played a part, but much more lead was introduced into the bodies of Romans because of the following practice: The Romans drank a lot of wine, but they weren't able to preserve wine as well as we are nowadays, so it often went "off"...i.e., became sour because of lactic or acetic fermentation. Furthermore, it was shipped around the Mediterranean in amphorae that were lined with pitch, to prevent leakage and spoilage; so, much wine that had not yet spoiled still tasted like pitch (this is, I suspect, the origin of the Greek Retsina). So, to make wine palatable for banquets and festivals, Romans mixed it with concentrated grape juice. The juice was concentrated by boiling it down to a syrup in lead vessels. The acidity of the grape juice (pH 3.5 or so) makes lead much more soluble, and this concentrated juice was extremely high in lead. The wealthier Romans had more lead in their bodies than peasants.

I recently attended a lecture by a soil scientist who has worked for many years alongside archaeoligists all over the world, but particularly in the Middle East and Italy. He showed some slides of a villa of one of the Roman emperors that they had recently excavated. He had tested the soil over the (very large) site for heavy metals, and found abnormally high concentrations of lead in the soil surrounding the residential part of the compound; and he wondered aloud what could be the reason. I related to him the above method of sweetening wine, and speculated that the high lead resulted from many years of drunken Romans urinating and vomiting their lead-laden wine in the yard during bacchanalian revelries. He wa skeptical, but I'm sure that was the reason.

As an aside, I have a Greek friend who claims that the ancient Greeks put pitch in their wine just to keep the Romans from stealing it!

Here's a good (though brief)treatment of the effects of soil erosion and exhaustion on the Roman empire, by G. T. Wrench (here at http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Wrench_Recon/Wrench_Recon_3-5.html )

"...Roman Soil Erosion
The best summary of this aspect of Roman history which I have read is that of Professor Simkhovitch, in an essay published in the Political Science Quarterly of the Columbia University, 1916, under the title of 'Rome's Fall Reconsidered'.

Simkhovitch began with quotations from Roman writers, Pliny, Horace, Varro, Columella and others, who were fully aware of Rome's progressive degradation at the roots. The process was a slow, progressive exhaustion of soil fertility. It was not due to lack of knowledge of good farming, for, 'nothing could be more startling than the Roman knowledge of rational and intensive agriculture'. Nor, I think, could it be said to be due to debt, for debt did not begin its devastating career until the fertility of the soil became impoverished. Debt was not necessary as long as the farming families were able to give their time to intensive cultivation.

The spread of the degradation of the soil was centrifugal from Latium itself outwards. Varro noted abandoned fields in Latium, and two centuries later Columella, about A.D. 60, referred to all Latium as a country where the people would have died of starvation, but for their share of Rome's imported corn. The Roman armies moved outwards from Latium demanding land; victory gave more land to the farmers; excessive demands again brought exhaustion of fertility; again the armies moved outwards.

'Province after province was turned by Rome into a desert,' wrote Simkhovitch, 'for Rome's exactions naturally compelled greater exploitation of the conquered soil and its more rapid exhaustion. Province after province was conquered by Rome to feed the growing proletariat with its corn and to enrich the prosperous with its loot. The devastation of war abroad and at home helped the process along. The only exception to the rule of spoliation and exhaustion was Egypt, because of the overflow of the Nile. For this reason Egypt played a unique role in the empire. It was the emperor's personal possession, and neither senators nor knights could visit it without special permission, for even a small force, as Tacitus stated, might "block up the plentiful corn country and reduce all Italy to submission".'

Latium, Campania, Sardinia, Sicily, Spain, Northern Africa, as Roman granaries, were successively reduced to exhaustion. Abandoned land in Latium and Campania turned into swamps, in Northern Africa into desert. The forest-clad hills were denuded. 'The decline of the Roman Empire is a story of deforestation, soil exhaustion and erosion,' wrote Mr. G. V. Jacks in The Rape of the Earth. 'From Spain to Palestine there are no forests left on the Mediterranean littoral, the region is pronouncedly arid instead of having the mild humid character of forest-clad land, and most of its former bounteously rich top-soil is lying at the bottom of the sea.'

The same fate at a later date fell upon Asia Minor, the decline of the Eastern repeating that of the Western Empire in its soil-aspects. Sir William Ramsay, in The National Geographical Magazine of November, 1922, wrote one of those articles which almost stagger one with the super-eminence of the treatment of the soil in the story of mankind. The Province of Asia 'in Roman times was highly populated and therefore highly cultivated ... It is difficult to give by statistics any conception of the great wealth and the numerous population of Asia Minor in the Roman period. In the single province of "Asia", to use the Roman name for the western part of the peninsula, which was the richest and most highly educated of the whole country, there were 230 cities which each struck its own special coinage, under its own name and its own magistrates, each proud of its individuality and character as a self-governing unit in the great Empire.'

Sir William carried out a careful exploration of some of the areas of high cultivation, which he regarded as the necessary basis of this wealthy province. What he found was what is found elsewhere, namely, hills denuded of forest and swept by heavy seasonal rains, and what he further found was the relics of the extensive terraced engineering by which the nourishing water had once been conserved and distributed: 'In older time', he wrote, 'the numerous terraces would have detained the water from point to point up the mountain side, preventing it from ever acquiring a sufficient volume to sweep down in a destroying flood.' Against this fertile land came invaders. First came the least destructive, the Arabs, least destructive because they observed in war the sanctity of trees. The Arabs could under the rules of war destroy the crops and produce of the enemy, but only exceptionally the tree, which conserved the soil. 'It was left to the Crusaders under the command of German, Norman and Frankish nobles and bishops, to inaugurate the era of total destruction of a country by cutting down the trees ... These broke the strength of an organized society by reducing a great part of the country from the agricultural to the nomadic stage. The supply of food diminished accordingly, and with the waning of the food-supply the population necessarily decreased.

'A decreasing population', continued this masterly account, 'in its turn was unable to supply the labour necessary to maintain the old standard of water engineering, on which prosperity rested. Gradually industries languished and died in the towns as well as the agriculture in the country. The Sultans did what they could. Neither the Seljuk Turks nor the Ottoman Turks were actuated by fanaticism. They wished to preserve the old social system so far as it was consistent with the dominance of a conquering caste; but they could not maintain the education which was necessary in the old Roman system ... Thus the whole basis of prosperity was wrecked, not by intention, but by steady decay. A number of causes co-operated and each cause intensified the others. Can the prosperity of this derelict land be restored?'..."

I've seen some recent research pointing to the same situation as the principal cause of the collapse of Mayan civilization.

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