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Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- It wasn't a coincidence that the first syphilis epidemic in Europe occurred soon after Columbus and his men returned from the New World, researchers said.

The first explorers of the Americas probably contracted a tropical disease caused by the same family of bacteria that causes syphilis and carried it back home, where it mutated into the sexually transmitted disease, said a group of scientists who studied its genetic history.

The ``Columbus hypothesis'' was previously thought to be true primarily because of the timing of the first outbreak, which devastated Europe in 1495. In the latest report, published in the journal Public Library of Science, or PLOS, researchers from Emory University in Atlanta compared the genomes of 26 forms of the bacteria that cause syphilis and other diseases. They found the strain that ravaged Europe was probably related to an older strain from South America.

``That supports the hypothesis that syphilis -- or some progenitor -- came from the New World,'' Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory, said in a statement.

A family of bacteria called treponema causes syphilis, which is sexually transmitted, as well as a number of other diseases such as yaws, an infection of the skin and bones.

Harper and her colleagues studied the degree of genetic connection between the different strains of treponema and found that syphilis-causing strains of the bacterium arose recently, while the strains causing yaws were much older.

It may be that a strain of treponema that flourished in the warm, humid climate of the tropical New World mutated into the syphilis-inducing form in order to survive in the colder climes of Europe, the researchers said.

`Major Killer'

``Syphilis was a major killer in Europe during the Renaissance,'' said George Armelagos, a skeletal biologist at Emory and co-author of the study. ``It could be argued that syphilis is one of the important early examples of globalization and disease, and globalization remains an important factor in emerging diseases.''

There were more than 36,000 cases of syphilis recorded in the U.S. in 2006, an 11.8 percent increase from the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. If untreated, the disease can cause difficulty coordinating muscle movements, paralysis, numbness, gradual blindness, and dementia, and can be fatal.

 Article by bloomberg

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