the discovery of this infectious disease on the remains of a Roman skeleton allows us to know more about its origins

An American study confirms the hypothesis according to which malaria spread to Europe from Asia around 2,000 years ago.

It is a Roman skeleton known under the name Velia-186, at the heart of an American study and which is echoed in the journal Nature, Wednesday March 13, which could allow us to know much more about the origins of malaria. A rather extraordinary scientific study because it is very difficult to find signs of malaria in ancient human remains. To do this, it is necessary to detect the parasite’s DNA in these remains. Plasmodium falciparumthe deadliest species responsible for this disease, and until now researchers had never managed to obtain a complete genomic sequence on a skeleton from before the 20th century.

This is now done thanks to Velia-186, or rather thanks to its teeth, which allowed researchers to identify more than 5,000 unique elements of genetic information. According to the researchers behind the study, these results are important because they confirm the hypothesis according to which malaria spread to Europe from Asia around 2,000 years ago, during the last period of ancient Greek civilization, called Hellenistic, a period of strong globalization.

Malaria remains one of the worst scourges of humanity today, responsible for more than 400,000 deaths each year worldwide, mainly children under the age of five. The discovery of ancient plasmodia genomes could reveal information about how malaria parasites adapted to drugs like quinine, researchers say.

Parts of the world have managed to eliminate this disease

A discovery also which represents a bite, not from a mosquito, but from a reminder. Remember not to give in to fatalism, faced with a disease that is more cosmopolitan than tropical, one of the oldest diseases of humanity, but that several regions of the world, Central Asia, the Caucasus, but also Europe , have managed to eliminate thanks to environmental sanitation measures, after centuries of epidemics.

As evidenced by the skeleton Velia-186, but also the words of a certain Ronsard, himself infected in 1560 with malaria. Ronsard who described himself thus in one of his poems, at the peak of his illness: “waiting for this execrable, horrible quartan fever to leave my veins, which consumes both my body and my heart and makes me experience extreme languor.”