TORONTO — The earliest recorded cases of what we now know was syphilis in the old world date to 1495 in Europe, when Columbus’ men returned to Italy after their pioneering voyages to the New World.

Dr. Michael Silverman poses with Guyanese children on a recent Ve’ahavta mission.

Shortly thereafter, sex in Europe was never the same, as a new venereal disease laid waste to Renaissance Europe. Nobody knew how or why.They do now.

Toronto’s Jewish, non-profit humanitarian organization, Ve’ahavta, has helped clear up an old mystery for the global medical community.

Doctors working on relief projects in Guyana for Ve’ahavta have helped confirm that the sexually transmitted disease syphilis was spread to the old world from the new more than 500 years ago.

In 2005, Ve’ahavta doctors collected samples of a disease called “yaws” – found only in certain regions of South America and Africa – for their peers back in North America. Tests proved that both yaws and syphilis share a common bacterial family, treponema pallidum, although yaws is not known to be sexually transmitted.

Sarah Zelcer, director of international programs for Ve’ahavta, explained to The CJN the genesis of the finding.

“Our Guyana medical project was one of our first projects,” she said. “And  Dr. Michael Silverman [an infectious disease and tropical medicine specialist] who was one of our founding directors, had been going down to Guyana [since the mid-1990s] on mini-medical missions and discovered yaws still in existence.”

But the discovery of the relationship between yaws and syphilis was almost never made, Zelcer explained.

Having decided to treat yaws with penicillin capsules, Silverman had nearly eradicated the disease in the indigenous population. In fact, he said the samples collected in 2005 were the last cases his team has seen since.

Still, the samples were enough for Silverman’s colleague, Dr. Kristin Harper at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta who used a phylogenetic approach – study of the evolutionary development of the disease – to confirm yaws as the source of syphilis. At the time, Harper was trying to find the source of syphilis, and she was missing only a sample of yaws to examine.

The recent publication of the discovery has made medical headlines worldwide.

“All the syphilis we see today is from the interaction of Columbus’ men with the Amerindians,” Silverman told The CJN last week.

He explained that as of 25 years ago, yaws was thought to have been eradicated in the western hemisphere due to massive inoculation campaigns by the World Health Organization in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, as Silverman and his team journeyed further into the interior of Guyana on their annual missions of chesed and tikkun olam, they noticed that yaws was still in existence.

“It was primarily a childhood disease, affecting about 5.1 per cent of the child population,” Silverman said. “And the [yaws] sores were found mostly on children’s arms or legs… because that’s the skin that would come into contact with each other to spread the disease. But it would have been something almost everyone contracted in youth… so yaws would have had no need to develop into a sexually transmitted disease [in the New World].”

Silverman and fellow researchers hypothesize that the disease mutated from a childhood illness to a sexually transmitted disease because Columbus’ men, who travelled fully clothed, would have exposed only their genitalia to the disease during sexual activity in the New World. The disease would have then adapted to exposure to this new body area and become much more virulent in a population without any natural immunity, spreading easily between sexual partners.

The result was what historians call “The Great Pox,” which killed nearly five million people in Europe.

While discovering the source of syphilis provided some fun media attention, Silverman said he’s much more gratified at the results of Ve’ahavta’s campaign to wipe out yaws in Guyana.

“I’m most proud of the fact that it seems we’ve eradicated a childhood scourge,” Silverman said, adding that return missions to Guyana since 2005 have failed to turn up a single new case of yaws.

For more information, visit veahavta.org/guyanaresearch.asp