Columbus Got Syphilis from Native Americans

Columbus Got Syphilis from Native Americans

RUSH: But first, before we get into all of that, let's start with asking those of you who are relatively youthful, say those of you who graduated haskrool in the last 15 years during the multicultural takeover of the American haskrool curriculum, how many of you have been taught that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis, racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmental destruction to the New World, when he came here from the Old World? How many of you have been taught that? It's a shocking number, I am sure. The truth now has finally come out. The spread of syphilis across the globe was probably sparked by Columbus and his crew, who arrived in the New World sterile. They did not bring syphilis with them. They got it from the Native Americans. That's the latest research. And then once Columbus and his crew contracted syphilis, the bacteria, whatever it is, when they went back to the Old World, bammo! -- it spread like the plague.

"A comparison of 23 strains of Treponema pallidum bacterium found that the modern variety that causes the sexually transmitted disease was most closely related to bacteria collected from a remote tribe in Guyana. Because the tribe has had little contact with the outside world, researchers think the strain is very close to what was circulating in the Americas at the time of Columbus' voyage in 1492. The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases--" Ha! That's the name of the magazine. Would you love to have a subscription to that? Ha, ha! The Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases. What would the centerfold in a magazine like that be? Anyway, it "adds more fuel to the long debate over the origin of syphilis. 'There are loose ends, but ... it looks as if it's very interesting evidence pointing to New World treponematosis being the ancestor of venereal syphilis,' said Della Collins Cook, a physical anthropologist at Indiana University in Bloomington who was not involved in the study. But other experts argued that the study's findings were still not strong enough to overturn a theory that venereal syphilis in Europe evolved from local strains." So you have to have the critics in there. But the latest research, ladies and gentlemen, is that Christopher Columbus' gang arrived clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, and then they got in a little whoopee with the Indians in Guyana, and, bam, syphilis was then taken to the rest of the world.