Paris--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.
A microclimate of exceptionally dry air prevented the bodies and garments from rotting.
In many cases, the individuals' names and details about their death were available from records -- making it a treasure trove for epidemiologists with valuable clues about how diseases spread in earlier times.
The researchers extracted samples from 26 of the Vac bodies with markers for TB infection. Eight yielded a sample good enough to enable genetic sequencing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis germs.
What emerged is a tableau of a disease that fully lives up to its reputation in folklore.
TB was raging in 18th-century Europe, even before urbanisation and crowded housing made it a killer on a much greater scale, the investigators found.
M. tuberculosis was first described in 1882 by the German microbiologist Robert Koch.
TB, or consumption as it was then called, killed one person in seven, Koch wrote.
"Microbiological analysis of samples from contemporary TB patients usually report a single strain of tuberculosis per patient," said Mark Pallen of the University of Warwick medical school in central England, who led the new probe.
AFP
