Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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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.
.....The Roman dating supports recent scientific estimates that tuberculosis first emerged about 6,000 years ago.
Read more at: Tales from the crypt Mummies reveal TB s Roman lineage
Someone from the late Roman period said, "How will future generations remember us? What impact will we have?"
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.
.....The Roman dating supports recent scientific estimates that tuberculosis first emerged about 6,000 years ago.
Read more at: Tales from the crypt Mummies reveal TB s Roman lineage
Someone from the late Roman period said, "How will future generations remember us? What impact will we have?"
