Seals not Columbus brought TB to Americas

[riky]

Seals not Columbus brought TB to Americas

<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/seals-not-columbus-brought-tb-americas-190747306.html"><img src="http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/_FPh9lEgxf6MWNg1mPl4kA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTg2O3E9NzU7dz0xMzA-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/afp.com/Part-PAR-Par7953694-1-1-0.jpg" width="130" height="86" alt="Sea lions relax on a pier in San Francisco on September 11, 2013" align="left" title="Sea lions relax on a pier in San Francisco on September 11, 2013" border="0" /></a>Seals and sea lions probably brought tuberculosis to the Americas centuries before Christopher Columbus first set foot there, scientists said Wednesday. As many as 20 million people lived in the Americas before Europeans arrived, and up to 95 percent of them were wiped out by new diseases to which they had no immunity. An international expert team analysed DNA of bacteria from three 1,000-year-old human skeletons found in Peru, and found a type of TB closely related to strains that infect seals and sea lions today. It means that seals and sea lions probably contracted the disease from a host animal from Africa, where the disease likely originated, and swam across the Atlantic to South America.</p><br clear="all"/>

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