In 1545 disaster struck Mexico’s Aztec nation when people started coming down with high fevers, headaches and bleeding from the eyes, mouth and nose. Death generally followed in three or four days.
500 years later, scientists discover what probably killed the Aztecs
Within five years, 15 million people – 80% of the population – were
wiped out in an epidemic named ‘cocoliztli’, meaning pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.
Its cause, however, has been questioned for nearly 500 years.
Its cause, however, has been questioned for nearly 500 years.
On Monday scientists swept aside smallpox, measles, mumps, and influenza as likely suspects, identifying a typhoid-like “enteric fever” for which they found DNA evidence on the teeth of long-dead victims.
“The 1545-50 cocoliztli was one of many epidemics to affect Mexico after the arrival of Europeans, but was specifically the second of three epidemics that were most devastating and led to the largest number of human losses,” said Åshild Vågene of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, in a study published in the science journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The outbreak is considered one of the deadliest epidemics in human history, approaching the Black Death bubonic plague that killed 25 million people in western Europe in the 14th century – about half the regional population.
The 1545 cocoliztli pestilence in what is today Mexico and part of Guatemala came just two decades after a smallpox epidemic killed an estimated 5-8 million people in the immediate wake of the Spanish arrival.
A second outbreak from 1576 to 1578 killed half the remaining population.
Even at the time, physicians said the symptoms did not match those of better-known diseases such as measles and malaria.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/16/mexico-500-years-later-scientists-discover-what-killed-the-aztecs
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