Everyone blamed their neighbours for syphilis; its DNA points to the Americas
When syphilis tore through Europe after 1494, Italians called it the French disease and the name stuck for decades. For centuries historians argued over whether Columbus's sailors brought it back or it had lurked in Europe unnoticed. Ancient genomes now trace the bacterium's origins to the Americas, roughly 9,000 years ago.
The first recorded European outbreak struck Naples in 1494 or 1495, during a French invasion led by Charles VIII, whose army included mercenaries. As troops scattered homeward, the infection went with them. The Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro coined the name syphilis in 1530. Its victims over the centuries are thought to include Franz Schubert, Édouard Manet, Scott Joplin and Al Capone.
Pinning down its origin was hard because syphilis mimics so many illnesses that it earned the nickname the great imitator. It belongs to a family of four related infections, alongside yaws, bejel and pinta, the others being childhood diseases that are seldom fatal. The Columbian hypothesis pointed to the silence of medieval writers and the flood of reports of a new plague after Caribbean voyages. Its rival held that the disease had existed in Europe all along. In 2020 paleopathologists accepted around 21 ancient or medieval European skeletons with treponemal damage, including teenagers from the Greek colony of Metaponto and a 15th-century woman buried in Gloucester, though sceptics say some may reflect related diseases rather than syphilis itself.
Genetics is breaking the deadlock. The organism, Treponema pallidum, was identified in Berlin in 1905 by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann, and its genome was sequenced in 1998. Distinguishing its strains requires ancient DNA, because they are 99.8 percent identical, and the fragile bacterium rarely survives in bone. Even so, studies found yaws in a Lithuanian tooth from the 15th or 16th century and several treponemal strains in early modern Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands. A 2024 study in Nature concluded that all genetically characterised forms, ancient and modern, arose in the Americas after humans arrived there.
Treatment arrived late. Salvarsan, the first effective drug, came in 1910 from Sahachiro Hata working in Paul Ehrlich's laboratory, and penicillin followed in 1943. A skeleton found in the Yucatán Peninsula, over 9,900 years old, shows bone inflammation that the same family of bacteria can cause.
Source: History of syphilis
