500 years later, scientists finger germ behind Mexican ‘pestilence’

PARIS: In 1545, disaster struck Mexico’s Aztec nation when people started coming down with high fevers and headaches, bleeding from the eyes, mouth and nose. Death generally followed in three or four days. Within five years, as many as 15 million people — an estimated 80 percent of the population — were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means “pestilence” in the Aztec Nahuatl language. Its cause, however, has been in question for nearly 500 years. On Monday, scientists swept aside smallpox, measles, mumps, and influenza as likely suspects, fingering a typhoid-like “enteric fever” for which they found DNA evidence on the teeth of long-dead victims. “The cause of this epidemic has been debated for over a century by historians and now we are able to provide direct evidence through the use of ancient DNA to contribute to a longstanding historical question,” she told AFP. Vagene co-authored a study published in the science journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The cocoliztli outbreak is considered one of the deadliest epidemics in human history, approaching the “Black Death” bubonic plague that felled some 25 million people in western Europe in the 14th century — about half the regional population.