Wednesday, August 12, 2020

The Bishop's last sigh

Bishop Peder Winstrup of Lund died of tuberculosis AD 1679. He is now telling us his secrets, to Susanna Sabin et al. Monica Green has a most-impressive Twitter thread on that topic.

The mycobacteria-tuberculoses in Winstrup's lungs are in the L4 lineage. This aligns with Uganda and Cameroon. There also exist some Pannonian remains: later but also early-modern, Magyar Hungarian - not so aligned. Sabin's crew notes other crews' backtracing of tuberculosis from the Romans. So, Lund got his bug not from a European reservoir but, perhaps, from the Atlantic trade of his own day. The bug itself arose from the Neolithic and in [east-?] Africa.

(American TB came from sealions. F'ing sealions.)

I suppose the Romans had it, for their part, from the Suez port Pelusium and/or Garamantia. Maybe the Late Antique slave-trade did it.

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