Smallpox Virus Detected in Inca Remains Came from Europe

DUBLIN, IRELAND—According to a Live Science report, the earliest known smallpox genomes found in the Americas have been recovered from the bones of two mummified Inca individuals recovered in northern Chile, which have been dated to between 1492 and 1631. The disease, which is caused by the variola virus, was first documented in the Americas in 1518, during the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean. “I don’t think there was any historical record documenting smallpox in this particular community, so no one expected the smallpox evidence,” said Shigeki Nakagome of Trinity College Dublin. The study also revealed that the two individuals had contracted the same strain of the virus, and may have been infected during the same outbreak. When the researchers compared this virus with other ancient and modern strains of variola viruses, they found that it matched an extinct lineage that split from a European strain around 1296, making it a step between medieval European strains and modern strains of the virus. “We provide the first molecular evidence of smallpox introduction to the Americas through colonization,” Nakagome said. The disease eventually killed an estimated three to four million people living in the Americas. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science. To read about excavations on the estate of the eighteenth-century physician who pioneered the smallpox vaccine, go to "Letter from England: The Scientist's Garden."