Salmonella took a heavy toll on Native Americans

IT WAS long assumed that smallpox and measles were responsible for wiping out millions of native Americans when Europeans arrived, but a study suggests an additional culprit: salmonella.

The discovery was made after work on a train station in Barcelona revealed mass graves of soldiers who died during a mid-17th century siege of the city.

Scientists found salmonella DNA in the teeth of two, the same strain identified in 2018 in Mexican mass graves of indigenous people who died soon after the arrival of Spanish colonialists.

Analysis of the two strains suggests they had a common ancestor, from Europe around the turn of the 14th century. Salmonella fever had a death rate of 10 to 20 per cent before antibiotics. “Until now it was thought that the causes of the epidemics in America were measles and smallpox,” said Spanish geneticist Carles Lalueza-fox.

“What our work shows is that probably the paratyphoid fever caused by this salmonella was also in the cocktail of diseases carried by the Europeans that caused that disaster.”

There were estimated to be 15 to 30 million native Americans in what is now Mexico and Central America when the first Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519.

That fell to two million by the end of the century, a disaster that was ascribed in part to a mysterious illness known locally as cocoliztli, described as causing a high fever, abdominal pain and diarrhoea. Such symptoms would fit those caused by salmonella.