Remember! When man first returned from the moon, the astronauts had to stay in quarantine for a long time, because the new explorers knew full well the damage their ancestors had caused during their distant voyages. The first enemy of man is, and will remain, the microbe. Especially the journeys of microbes.
Before Christopher Columbus decided to direct his bow to the New World, Mexico was a kind of paradise, and its inhabitants, the Aztecs, left traces of a brilliant civilization, made up of scholars and architects, whose traces are still visible all over the country. The history books are not very verbose on the reasons for their disappearance. The weapons of the time, not very effective, were not enough to explain such a genocide. We forget that it is not junk jewelry, whose legend tells us the distribution among “savages with bright eyes” that the explorers brought with them, but rather small organisms, weapons of mass destruction, which have always existed and which moreover retain all their virulence.
Salmonella
This modern history readily recognizes. On the other hand, we did not know which “weapons” had struck: Diphtheria, smallpox, plague…, the great classics of the devastating epidemics of the Middle Ages?
Well no ! The journal Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals the name of the culprit. It is a bacterium very fashionable for a few months, the famous Salmonella, a distant cousin of which is currently wavering the giant Lactalis.
It is the reading of the account of the symptoms before death and especially the search for DNA on bone remains, which have highlighted the person responsible for the death of 80% of the inhabitants of the coastal areas and 50% of those of the interior of Mexico. A health catastrophe which condemned the survival of an entire civilization.
Whether through sexual intercourse or through the pets that the crews brought with them, the contamination was massive and rapid.
The threat remains intact
The anecdote of the quarantine of the astronauts, makes a little smile today, but specialists in microbes know perfectly well that the world is at the mercy of a rapid and unexplained mutation of a nice virus or an innocuous bacteria.
From time to time man is still surprised: for example we know that large aircraft are not free from responsibility in the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, a very old virus that ended up living lurking somewhere and that its export has awakened.
And what if tomorrow a ship from another world lands on our good old earth. Know that it is not only the writers of Hollywood to think about it….
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