FROM NBC NEWS: When Napoleon marched into Russia in 1812, he brought with him the largest army Europe had ever seen. When he limped back out, he’d met his match — not in muskets or cannon fire, but in microbes.
Researchers who analyzed DNA from the teeth of soldiers who died during the retreat from Moscow say they have identified two diseases that devastated the emperor’s vaunted Grande Armée.
Ever since 1812, “people have thought that typhus was the most prevalent disease in the army,” said Nicolás Rascovan, the head of the microbial paleogenomics unit at the Institut Pasteur and an author of the study, published in the journal Current Biology.
Using ancient DNA from the dental remains of 13 soldiers found near Vilnius, Lithuania, Rascovan and his team used shotgun sequencing to identify two “previously undocumented pathogens.”
“We confirmed the presence of Salmonella enterica belonging to the Paratyphi C lineage,” he said.
The bacteria is responsible for paratyphoid fever.
They also found “Borrelia recurrentis, the bacteria responsible for relapsing fever.”
The symptoms of these illnesses match the descriptions of what the soldiers experienced in records from the time.
A “reasonable scenario” for the deaths would be a “combination of fatigue, cold, and several diseases, including paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever,” researchers wrote.
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