Samples from mummies in a Hungarian crypt have revealed that multiple tuberculosis strains derived from a single Roman ancestor that circulated in 18th-century Europe, scientists said Tuesday.Their findings, published in the journal
Nature Communications, drew on a remarkable, if gruesome, source.
In 1994, workers restoring a Dominican church in Vac, Hungary, stumbled upon the remains of more than 200 people whose corpses had become naturally mummified. The individuals, many of them wealthy Catholics, had been placed fully clothed in coffins in the church crypt just north of the capital Budapest between 1731 and 1838. All the samples studied carried a genetic signature of a notorious tuberculosis strain called Lineage 4, which today accounts for more than a million TB cases every year in Europe and the Americas. By building a family tree of the germ, the team dated the bacterial ancestor to the late Roman period.
"(It) confirmed the genotypic continuity of an infection that has ravaged the heart of Europe since prehistoric times." Now, reheat your pizza and think pleasant thoughts when cracking another craft beer open; thankful you weren't a dim witted peasant employed as a 18th century body snatcher.
