Tuberculosis Genomes Show Why It's A Wildly Successful Pathogen
Wednesday, August 21, 2013 - 17:20
in Biology & Nature
Tuberculosis (TB) is a wildly successful pathogen, if your goal is to infect up to two billion people in every corner of the world, with a new infection of a human host every second. A new analysis of dozens of tuberculosis genomes gathered from around the world has shed some light on how it evolves to resist countermeasures - it that marches in lockstep with human population growth and history, evolving to take advantage of the most crowded and wretched human conditions. The analysis reveals that tuberculosis experienced a 25-fold expansion worldwide in the 17th century, a time when human populations underwent explosive growth and European exploration of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania was at its peak. read more