Strep: Infection in both Americas and Rome

[guy]

A pre-Columbian Bolivian mummy was found to contain Streptococcus pyogenes, the bacteria that cause strep throat. It proves that the infection was already present in the Americas before European contact. 
 

Interestingly, 4000-year-old European samples have also shown the infection. Although never found in Roman DNA, Galen, Celsus, and other Roman physicians describe an erysipelas-like infection, usually caused by Streptococcus. The sharply demarcated redness and rapidly spreading swelling associated with fever that characterized erysipelas is described by Galen and other ancient physicians (pictured below):

 

Streptococcus was one of the known infections to impact both the Romans and the Americas.

Many virulent infections are thought to be confined to Europe rather than the pre-Columbian Americas: smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, etc.

 

The standard epidemiological narrative holds that the New World lacked epidemic-scale pathogens because it lacked the population density and animal domestication that drove the evolution of Old World diseases.

But the Eurac study shows S. pyogenes, a globally distributed, human-to-human pathogen capable of causing scarlet fever, toxic shock, and invasive infections, was already circulating in Indigenous South American populations between AD 1283-1383.

This means at least one “Old World‑type” pathogen did not arrive with Europeans.

The article shows that the Old World–New World disease divide was real but not absolute. At least one major pathogen long assumed to be European was already present in the Americas centuries before contact, revealing a more entangled and ancient global disease history than previously believed.

 

https://www.eurac.edu/en/press/the-bacterium-responsible-for-scarlet-fever-was-not-introduced-to-the-americas-by

 

https://archaeology.org/news/2026/04/21/scarlet-fever-bacterium-detected-in-700-year-old-tooth/

Edited April 22 by guy