Patipahat Boonmanuch, Captain's brother, held a picture of him during his funeral. Edgar Hernandez, a 5-year-old living in La Gloria, Mexico, was believed to be "patient zero" in the swine flu, or H1N1, outbreak. He survived swine flu, which his mother believed developed due to a pig in the neighborhood. Emile Ouamouno, a 2-year-old boy in the southern Guinea village of Meliandou, was identified as "patient zero" in the Ebola outbreak circa Emile died of the disease, as did several of his family members.
The truth about 'patient zero' and HIV's origins. Decades passed before research, published in the journal Nature last month, cleared Dugas' name and provided strong evidence that the virus emerged in the United States from a pre-existing Caribbean epidemic in or around Though Dugas' disturbing saga has been put to rest, the term "patient zero" lives on, and continues to create confusion and curiosity about how disease spreads.
Read More. Super-spreaders vs. Many scientists and public health officials are loath to identify those patients and avoid the term "patient zero" altogether, said Thomas Friedrich, an associate professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.
Some scientists argue that it's equally important to analyze primary cases -- the person or animal that first brings a bacterium or virus into a population. For many infectious-disease pandemics, the primary case will never be known, said Dr. And even after an infectious agent crosses into the human population, some people are more capable of spreading it than others, he noted.
For instance, even though Dugas wasn't the patient zero of HIV, he still may have served as a super-spreader, Lipkin said. Still others might be super-shedders, individuals who shed many more types of the virus into the environment -- and not just through person-to-person contact -- than others. Whether they were truly patient zero, super-spreaders or super-shedders, here are the stories of six people who may have played a role in the spread of deadly diseases in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The real Typhoid Mary. One of the first-known examples of super-spreading, and maybe even super-shedding, was Mary Mallon. She became known as Typhoid Mary, said Dr. Mallon, an Irish-born cook, appeared healthy as she prepared meals for the families she worked for in the early s in New York. Soon after her meals were served, members of the households where she worked developed typhoid fever , a life-threatening illness caused by the bacterium Salmonella typhi. As more households where she worked developed typhoid fever, Mallon was soon identified as something of a patient zero, even though she never developed the symptoms.
Mallon was forced into quarantine on two occasions for a total of 26 years, during which she unsuccessfully sued the New York department of health , saying she didn't feel sick and therefore could not infect other people. She died in No one really knows whether Mallon was the true patient zero in the typhoid case or simply a super-spreader or super-shedder. After all, naming a patient zero remains tricky. The closest we can come is probably the SARS epidemic, he said.
The spread of SARS. Liu Jianlun, a year-old medical doctor from southern China's Guangdong province, was ill during his stay at the hotel and may have transferred the virus to at least 16 other guests staying on the same floor, according to the bulletin. Coincidentally, Liu stayed in room on the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel. More Videos Looking at the legacy of SARS The other hotel guests who were exposed to the virus probably traveled to other countries after being infected.
The hospital where he worked treated SARS, and Liu might have come into contact with the virus through a patient. In Guangdong, it was believed that a farmer first developed SARS after coming in contact with the virus through an animal. The disease occurs over several stages, which can be separated by weeks to years.
The infection typically begins with a chancre primary syphilis : a painless sore that can form on the genitals or mouth. The sore heals in four to eight weeks, and is then followed by a rash over most of the body secondary syphilis. Months to years later, tertiary syphilis can manifest in a variety of ways. In recent decades, some scholars have begun to challenge the idea that syphilis is a New World export. A number of papers have been published over the past 20 years examining Old World skeletons with lesions suggestive of syphilis infections.
However, a publication released just last month claims to add another pre-Columbian syphilis victim from Austria. The publication examined a single specimen, a child around 6 years old. This paper, like many before it claiming Old World syphilis cases, looks at skeletal evidence from a single individual to make their case of pre-Columbian syphilis. But Molly Zuckerman , an assistant professor of anthropology at Mississippi State, remains unconvinced. This would mean the skeletons bearing signs of syphilis might not actually be pre-Columbian.
In the case of the paper that claimed to find a pre-Colombian syphilis victim in Austria, Zuckerman notes that the study did not measure for the presence of carbon or nitrogen isotopes. These isotopes indicate presence of marine animals in the diet. They can also throw off the accuracy of dating considerably, so scientists need to test for them and adjust their estimates accordingly.
Bruce Rothschild , another researcher who has studied historical syphilis, was even more blunt in an interview with the Daily Mail. In the end, the ultimate origin of syphilis will be difficult to definitively prove.
While the bulk of the evidence right now points to a New World birthplace, this will naturally be contested as new skeletons are unearthed. Meanwhile, the story of syphilis is far from dead and buried. It will be interesting to see more DNA sequencing approaches of ancient tissues, to see what they come up with, and whether those support the pre- or post-Columbian origin of syphilis in Europe.
Harper KN et al. Mulligan et al When I looked over the www. It looked rather like this: Q: Where did syphillis come from? A: The most 'intelligent' species on the planet The discovery of a few skeletons with these symptoms isn't incompatible with the theory in Harper et al. It's well known that fishermen from the European Northwest had been visiting North America for centuries before Columbus.
Note where all the skeletons so far were discovered: England and Ireland. It could easily be that occasional cases of the New World Yaws had found their way back to Europe without starting an epidemic, then with Columbus a more virulent form from the West Indies set off the epidemic.
I've often wondered if the origin of syphilis was a recombination between a new world and old world strain. Perhaps the original plague was nothing more than a venerial location for New World Yaws infection among a population with no inherited immunity.
I read through the paper, and as best I can tell while they remark on the decrease, they give no explanation for the decrease. Why is syphilis so successful, while its cousins are disappearing? I've seen this phrasing before. Is there a subtle reason I'm missing that such a clunky phrase as "most ancient" is used instead of "oldest"? Thank you for the cool post. Biology was never my major, and I love intelligent articles from outside my expertise! After all the Old World communicable diseases like smallpox and measles that decimated populations in the New World, it's nice to see a bit of comeback.
I remember learning in ancient history that camels carry and can transmit syphilis by spitting on you. Don't know if that is true, but they could make a pretty good reservoir host that wasn't common in Europe before the industrial revolution.
Another interesting fact is that armadillos are a reservoir host for leprosy This is very fine info about the disease syphilis, A fine post covering all the major aspect of the disease. As like with the skin condition vitiligo the treatment of the syphilis is a tricky matter. So the strong mental condition would be very useful for the treatment of syphilis.
This learned discourse doesn't agree with the university taught stages of syphilis i was taught back in the fifties, we were taught that there were 4 stages, the "gumma" appeared in the tertiary stage, and the quaternary stage was "dementia of the insane", the delusions of grandeur, the Napoleons and Nelsons marching around in the asylums. Have the text books been re-written since I was a lad? By tsmith on January 15, At the opposite end of the spectrum, the syphilis spirochete appears to be the most recently diverged, and appeared to have also diverged from Old World yaws strains in what they suggest could have been a 3-stage evolution: First, T.
They also note that their study could answer some questions, but raise others: The virtual absence of syphilitic lesions from Pre-Columbian Old World skeletons can be explained simply in the context of this data; syphilis did not exist in these areas until the Renaissance.
References Harper KN et al. General Epidemiology. Historical studies of disease.
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