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Old World Medieval Treponema pallidum Complex Treponematosis: A Case Report
Hamadou Oumarou Hama1,2, Mahmoud A Boualam1,2, Anthony Levasseur1,2
1Aix-Marseille University, IRD, MEPHI, Institut Méditerranée Infection, Marseille, France.
Background:
Introduction of 1 Treponema pallidum complex pathogen in naive European populations following the return of Christopher Columbus' troops from Central America in 1493 is a central dogma in venereology.
Methods:
Among skeletal elements from the seventh or eighth century uncovered in Roquevaire, France, individual RS-1003 femur macroscopically suspected of having an infectious disease was investigated by means of paleoautoimmunohistochemistry, direct metagenomics, and paleoserology, along with 1 control femur from an apparently healthy individual (R-1003) and experimental negative controls.
Results:
RS-1003 femur showed infectious bone; paleoautoimmunohistochemistry of the lesions led to microscopic detection of a T. pallidum complex pathogen. Phylogenetic analyses comprising 71 T. pallidum complex-specific reads covering 2.37% of the T. pallidum subsp. pallidum reference genome sequence revealed an ancestral T. pallidum complex pathogen in the lesion. Paleoserology detecting T. pallidum-specific antigens confirmed positive serological findings in individual RS-1003. Individual R-1003 and the negative controls remained negative.
Conclusions:
This case, predating by 8 centuries previous detections of T. pallidum complex treponematosis in Europe, indicated that European populations were not naive to these pathogens before the 1493 introduction of a Central American T. pallidum complex pathogen overwhelming the T. pallidum ones previously circulating in the Old World. These data break a century-old dogma in medical microbiology.
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