Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "1495 Syphilis Outbreak: The Deadly Disease That Swept Across Europe | The Syphilis Enigma | Timeline" video.

  1. Syphilis closely resembles an old world disease called yaws. The Treponema bacterium causing the disease is very similar, but syphilis is more pathologically deadly and disfiguring. Yaws may have originated from warm tropical and subtropical Africa and spread by travellers to the Mediterreanean and Europe, where it mutated into syphilis. Hence it was Columbus' sailors who spread it to native Americans (not the other way around), along with the more deadly (and just as disfiguring) smallpox, measles and Christianity. Ah sorry, the last is not a microbial disease ;-)
    2