Prehistoric TB(Medicine and Travel)

There was a time in Europe when a third of all who died died from tuberculosis. When TB was introduced to native american tribes on the Eastern seaboard it decimated their villages and even today there is fear for communities in the Amazon that have never been exposed to TB. More than 2 billion in the world are infected and 2 million die each year.

National Jewish Hospital is just one institution that began as a consequence of the TB scourge that swept the Western World in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Bellevue Hospital was the first public hospital in the United States, frequently seeing TB patients, although I have met someone from Mass. General Hospital recently who states that MGH makes the same claim (Amy, they are WRONG! Every Yankee hopes Boston rots in hell anyway.) Amy didn't express knowledge of a Harvard opinion on who first stated the phrase, "Holy Cow" at a baseball game, though, another contentious issue on the East Coast. Anyway, at Bellevue Hospital, my friends and I worked in an environment of TB. It was the peak of the urban epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when public health budgets had been cut to the bone and AIDS had swept the urban landscape predisposing many to the consumptive effect of TB.

It's thought that TB in humans developed 15-20,000 years ago at a time when humans were domesticating animals to do human work and to feed them. Jared Diamond wrote in Guns, Germs, and Steel that humans tried to domesticate zebras, hippos, and lions but with poor outcome. So humans ended up domesticating dogs, cats, and cows. Lions, can you believe it?...that one should have been obvious. The cows were infected with a bacillus called Mycobacterium bovis (genus capitalized, species in small letters) and it is this bacillus that morphed into Mycobacterium tuberculosis. So humans started sleeping with or near their cows and low and behold they began getting ill. There is evidence of backbone TB in a Heidelberg, Germany man from the stone age, about 10,000 B.C. This is the oldest recorded evidence of TB. Shoulda had the beer.

Hippocrates referred to "consumption" as the most common illness in Greece. He thought it was related to familial inheritance but Aristotle thought it was related to an infectious disease. This is why we refer to Aristotle in history more often that Hippocrates. Another reason... Hippocrates suggested to other doctors that they avoid taking care of consumptive patients since they frequently die and this would affect the reputation of the doctor. Not everything Hippocrates wrote should be sacred to current physicians.

When historians talk of the end of the Stone Age(10,000-7500 BC), the domestication of animals and eventual development of tools, weapons, and means of travel such as sailing vessels and chariots, they often refer to the Indo-European people. This is a reference to the root language of people that migrated from the Fertile Crescent(parts of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq) and areas of the Southeast former Soviet Union near the Black Sea. Thousands of years ago this seems to be a center from which people migrated west, north and East. There were fewer migrating into Africa due to geographic boundaries like the Sahara (and lions). Linguists have been able to discover this migration by studying roots of words. The related languages extend from the Celtic to Sanskrit in India.

It's also noted that migration of the roots of Indo-european language seems to correlate with reported cases of TB in history. It also seems to correlate with the spread of religious principles we now see in the monotheistic religions, hinduism and buddhism.

In North America there is evidence of TB, Indo-European language and principles of monotheism but they all seem to develop later than these same events in Europe and the Middle East. Evidence of TB is found in the remains of the North American mastodon, a North American descendant of the woolly mammoth, which became extinct in 10,000-7500 BC. The most ancient finding of TB in Asia is from human remains from 1500 BC. Evidence of TB of the spine has been found in a Peruvian mummy from about 700 AD debunking the idea that the Vikings or Christopher Columbus introduced TB to America.

How did animals and humans get to North America? It's thought that the Bering Land Bridge existed until about 10,000 BC as the glaciers sucked up all the earth's water allowing migration to occur over areas that are now shallow seas. It's thought that at this time people walked to Australia from the Asian mainland as well. From about 20,000 BC to 10,000 BC North America was connected to Asia by this land bridge, a time when not only could you see Russia from Alaska but you could also walk there.

Not only that, but others have suggested that there has been nautical travel between Asia and North America along the inland coast of Japan/China to the Aleutian Islands and over. Thor Hyerdahl, of the Ra Expeditions, proved that primitive reed boats could be sailed from South Africa to Polynesia as well suggesting early communication prior to the European discovery of the Americas. Not only would this account for the transmission of TB but also it would account for some cultural and religious traditions thought to be unique to North American indigenous people. We're all one big family I guess.

I think next will be TB European style. Perhaps Europeans have seen the worst of the scourge since they were most highly infected 300-400 years ago. The rest of the world isn't off the hook though, we have a true infectious disease disaster on our hands.