What Killed the Mummified Swiss Woman ? Maybe Something We’ve Never Seen Before - Archaeology - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-02-07/ty-article/what-killed-the-mummified-swiss-woman-maybe-something-weve-never-seen-before/00000186-2c41-df2e-a59f-ee5b7b280000
(extrait) J’ai sélectionné une partie sur l’infection mycobactérienne du cerveau. Je conseille toutefois la lecture complète car l’essentiel du texte est au sujet du traitement de la syphillis (et des conséquences du mercure sur le corps humain) au cours des siècles.
Anna Catharina Bischoff died at the age of 68 in 1787, and was buried beneath the floor of Basel’s Barfüsser Church, right in front of where the choir stands. But what really killed her? Was this distinguished member of Swiss high society, judging by her final resting place, really done in by syphilis, as scientists have suggested?
This cause of death has been assumed based on damage to her bones and the high concentration of mercury discovered in multiple organs; bone lesions and mercury treatments are diagnostic hallmarks of syphilitic infection in archaeology. Yet it seems that this isn’t what killed her, Mohamed Sarhan of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies and colleagues reported in BMC Biology on Wednesday.
The team reports that reanalysis of her remains, now stored at the Basel Natural History Museum, found no evidence of syphilis bacteria while screening for pathogens. What they did find, though, was infection in her brain by a bacterium previously unknown to science, which had no business being there. It belongs to the greater family of non-tubercular mycobacteria, and how she was infected is a mystery, the team explains.
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She was identified, among other means, by a vast genealogic analysis effort that produced a 15-generation female family tree. This also revealed that she is Boris Johnson’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
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In short, the team concludes that they cannot categorically conclude what killed Anna Catharina Bischoff or Byschoff, but it doesn’t seem to have been syphilis, which may be a relief to her descendants worldwide.
More importantly, their results indicate that nontuberculous mycobacterium normally happy in soil and water may be an understudied cause of diseases that, even now, doctors often fail to recognize. Their paper also provides proof-of-concept for the discovery of completely unknown ancient pathogens using de novo metagenomic assembly. And lastly, it indicates that even when finding an ancient body with all the hallmarks of a deadly venereal disease, one shouldn’t leap to bawdy conclusions.
