May be a bit late to ask for a refund on your genes, but there’s now reason to believe the Romans donated a gene to their former colonies that makes people more susceptible to AIDS. This is a relatively new principle of heredity, but it makes sense.
Some genes have dual natures. One discovery was that the gene that predisposes people to diabetes is the same one that gives resistance to starvation. On the subject of infectious diseases, though, this is new territory.
The BBC:
The idea that something carried by the occupying Romans could have a widespread influence on the genes of modern Europeans comes from researchers at the University of Provence.
They say that the frequency of the variant corresponds closely with the shifting boundaries of the thousand-year empire.
In countries inside the borders of the empire for longer periods, such as Spain, Italy and Greece, the frequency of the CCR5-delta32 gene, which offers some protection against HIV, is between 0% and 6%
One of the difficulties here is that cross checks and verifications aren’t likely to be easy. Additional data might be available from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Crimean colonies, and it might confirm the stats. As you can see, there’s no lack of margin for error.
The theory makes a bit more sense with the idea that the Romans introduced an unknown disease, which created the genetic discrepancies over their tenure. Disease resistance is a part of natural selection, and the immune system is one of the most instantly responsive parts of human biology.
Give a statistician some room, and anything can happen. Another theory has emerged, and it’s no shrinking violet:
However, some researchers believe that infections may have played a role - but in reverse -increasing rather than decreasing the frequency of the variant.
Researchers at the University of Liverpool suggested that the variant may have offered protection against pandemics such as the Black Death which swept Europe on a regular basis during and after the Roman era.
These, said the Liverpool researchers, were illnesses which may have been lethal to people without the gene variant, raising its frequency from one in 20,000 people to approximately 10% in Northern Europe
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That’s a theory with some guts, and some depth of argument. The Plague was a good way of preventing Europeans, and it wasn’t coy about it. Survival rates were extraordinarily low. Some regions were literally annihilated, and the reason for survival rates elsewhere does need an explanation.
Diseases don’t normally destroy whole populations, because there are always a few resistant individuals at least in any large population. However, the reason for the resistance isn’t accidental. Recurrent cases of resistance, with groups of individuals immune, don’t just happen. Immunity has to be acquired from somewhere.
Somewhere in this lot is a bit of information which could make epidemic management on a large scale a lot easier.
All that’s needed now is some reliable information.
E pluribus, eh?
