Health & Fitness
Ancient Alpine Man Had Lyme Disease
A 5,000 year old man whose body was recently discovered in the Italian Alps, had traces of Lyme disease.
Lyme Disease – It’s Only About 5,000 Years Old
The article usually reads like this: “Lyme disease was first identified in the town of Lyme, CT in the 1970s…” but now the facts have changed dramatically.
The recently discovered Otzi the “Ice Man” whose frozen body was discovered by a climber in the Italian Alps, died 5,000 years ago and now we know that he was suffering from Lyme disease. "Our data point to the earliest documented case of a B. burgdorferi infection in mankind. To our knowledge, no other case report about borreliosis [Lyme disease] is available for ancient or historic specimens," the investigator writes in an article published on Tuesday (Feb. 28) in the journal Nature Communications.
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This summary article from the Huffington Post quotes Dr. Stephen Schutzer, of the University of Dentistry and Medicine of New Jersey whose research into the nature of Lyme disease is funded in part by grants from of Stamford.
