Two mummies of Egyptians who died very young, about 3 and a half millennia ago, were unearthed from a nameless tomb in Thebes, once a great necropolis and capital city of Egypt. DNA techniques used by the researchers enabled them to find out that the 2 people were killed by malaria, which pushes further in time the emergence of the pandemic, and also provides another reason for which Egyptians died so young.

 

Via complex DNA amplification and gene sequencing processes performed on 91 skeleton and mummy bone tissues, pathologist Andreas Nerlich and his team from the Munich's Academic Teaching Hospital Munchen-Bogenhausen in Germany found DNA traces of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest and most frequent of the 4 pathogens that cause malaria. Previous to this research, the only study indicating ancient cases of malaria involved the analysis of a Roman child's remains from the 5th century AD.

 

“We now know for sure that malaria was endemic in ancient Egypt,” states Nerlich. “This was only been speculated on the basis reports by Herodotus and some very faint evidence from ancient Egyptian papyri. In our finding, both positive cases came from two different tomb complexes at Thebes-West, dating from the New Kingdom until Late Period (1500 to 500 BC). Our discovery adds another infectious disease to the spectrum of paleomicrobiology in ancient Egypt, further explaining the influence of infectious diseases on such low life expectancy.” The study of the mummies in the Thebes tomb revealed that the dead were 20 to 30 years old and obviously belonged to upper social classes.

 

Malaria is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito, but it's actually caused by 4 variations of the Plasmodium family of protozoan parasites: falciparum, malariae, ovale and vivax. These breed and spread in the blood's red cells, and provoke symptoms like anemia (spleen, tachycardia and shortness of breath), high fever, chills, nausea, and, in its advanced stages, even coma and death.

Currently, there are more than 500 million malaria cases recorded worldwide every year, out of which about 2.7 million result in death. Most of the affected are residents of poor countries, and roughly 75% of these are African children from the Sub-Saharan area.