January 15, 2008 | 5 Comments

2008_01_15_chris.jpgChristopher Columbus not only brought war, oppression and the ravages of smallpox with him when he “discovered” America—he also invented syphilis! (Well, sorta. His sailors took the mutated, sexually transmitted form of the bug back to Europe.) And you thought that not getting mail delivered on his birthday was annoying … (yahoo.com)

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Author:Dashiell

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  • Come a little Miroslav Klose You’re My Kind of Man

    There’s an Italian Stallion man-slut joke in this, but I don’t have the time to wrap my mind around it.

  • Conrad

    Columbus is all about taken credit for other peoples work.

  • I.M.B.Y What’s THIS for…!

    Interesting yet dick shriveling.

  • Anonymous

    Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy science. Notice that the scientists didn’t say they’d identified syphilis itself in pre-Colombian native Americans. Syphilis’ sudden appearance in Europe is well-documented, but nobody’s presented evidence that it existed previously in the Americas either. ‘Yaws’, a precursor to syphilis, existed in both European and American populations. The best guess is that yaws spontaneously developed from skin-contact-transmission into the more serious sexually-transmitted syphilis because of larger urban centers . . . such as they had in Europe but not in the Americas.
    Perhaps it was an American strain of yaws; but syphilis was a European development. That would certainly explain why syphilis struck Native Americans with the same fatality rate as it did Europeans and at the same time. Otherwise, if syphilis was endemic to Native American populations, then the overall population wouldn’t have been as vulnerable as the previously-unexposed Europeans.
    [this information taken from "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett]

  • Anonymous

    In full disclosure, I should note that my above post will make my wife incredibly horny. She’s a total brain-slut.