Resumen de Seals brought tuberculosis to Americas first
Seals and sea lions may have brought a form of tuberculosis (TB) to the Americas, centuries before the Spanish did so. Johannes Krause of the University of Tubingen in Germany and his colleagues have taken a close look at three of the skeletons and radiocarbon dating showed that they lived between 1028 and 1280. Krause found that the bacteria in the skeletons were closely related to a TB strain called Mycobacterium pinnipedii, which infects sea lions and seals, and not to the strains infecting humans today. That suggests marine animals picked up the disease in Africa and carried it to the Americas.
