Add King Tut to the list of famous personages felled by malaria. Tut died at age 19 in 1324 BC. According to a new study in JAMA, scientists have found genetic evidence of Plasmodium falciparum lurking in his mummy.
Tut’s a famous guy but he isn’t malaria’s earliest known victim–not by far.
Tut died some two thousand years ago. In 1994, scientists found antigens to plasmodium parasites in 5,000-year-old Egyptian and Nubian mummies. Check it out here. References to malaria have also been found in 4,000-year-old Sumerian and Egyptian texts. But we know malaria’s been a much older scourge than that, thanks to molecular clock techniques that analyze the parasite’s genome. We’ve probably had it since we descended from apes.
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