Free Republic

Tomatoes could help fight off bacterial infections in your gut, a new study has found. One of the world's most widely consumed vegetables (or perhaps fruit?), they are packed with antioxidants, vitamins, and other compounds – two of which scientists at Cornell University in the US have identified for their potent bacteria-killing properties in a series of cell experiments. The research team, led by Cornell microbiologist Jeongmin Song, was interested in Salmonella, a genus of enteric bacteria that invade the intestine, often causing food poisoning. Specifically, the team focused on one typhoidal serotype of Salmonella, Salmonella enterica Typhi, which lives...

JENA, GERMANY—Phys.org reports that a study of genetic material recovered from the teeth of people buried in the Hagios Charalambos cave on the Greek island of Crete between about 2290 and 1909 B.C. detected the presence of extinct strains of two pathogens. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the British School at Athens, and Temple University suggest that epidemics brought about by Y. pestis, which causes plague, and S. enterica, which causes typhoid fever, could have contributed to the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian...

In the decades after Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, one of the worst epidemics in human history swept through the new Spanish colony. A mysterious disease called “cocolitzli” appeared first in 1545 and then again in 1576, each time killing millions of the native population. “From morning to sunset,” wrote a Franciscan friar who witness the epidemic, “the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.” In less than a century, the number of people living in Mexico fell from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. “It’s a massive population loss. Really, it’s...