Will Pizarro be blamed for everything?
Among many other things, it is often said that “it was the Spaniards and the Catholic missionaries who brought new diseases to the newly discovered American continent. The aboriginal victims did not possess the necessary antibodies against the new diseases, for example: tuberculosis (Koch’s bacillus), etc…”
But it seems that things are not so simple. The Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera (Sunday, April 28, 2002, p. 18) reports the following:
“Discovery: Pizarro and Tuberculosis”
Until now it had always been maintained that the Spanish conquistadors had introduced tuberculosis, together with other infectious diseases, into the New World. But a recent discovery casts serious doubt on such claims. A thorough medical study of a series of Peruvian mummies, carried out by scientists from the American University of Connecticut, had in fact found in numerous subjects the presence of inflammatory processes of the spinal column and lungs, typical of tuberculosis. The mummies analyzed were discovered in 1996 in some caves near the city of Chachapoyas, in northeastern Peru, located 2,300 meters above sea level in the Andean range. Their ages date from between 500 and 1,000 years before the present and are therefore certainly prior to the arrival and conquest of the Inca Empire by Pizarro’s Spanish troops.-
Source: Apologetica.org
Contributor and Translator: A.R., Portugal.
