11 Diseases

Diseases

Our research has only just started with

(i)   Malaria
Hoeppli, Reinhard
”Parasites and Parasitic Infections in Early Medicine and Science”. University of Malaya Press, Singapore, 1959.

Emphatically believes malaria was to be found in the New World before the arrival of Columbus.

(ii)   Tuberculosis
Goldstein, M S
‘Human Paleopathology and Some Diseases in Living Primitive Societies. A review of recent literature’. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1969: 3.

Malaria and tuberculosis were in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus.

(iii)   Syphilis

(iv)   Machado-Joseph Disease

Jerry Warsing is kindly researching the spread of this disease which he believes originated in the Yunnan province of S. China and was carried by Zheng He’s fleets, first to the Atlantic coast of N America and then to the Azores. His research has recently received support from the research of Bruges-Armas and colleagues (see 2).

Relevance to ‘1421’

Gavin Menzies believes that Machado-Joseph disease originated in the Yunnan Province of China before the 15th century, and that people suffering from this disease were aboard Zheng He’s Fleets.

They passed on the disease by sexual intercourse with people they met whilst ashore in foreign lands.  Hence tracing the ancestry of people who today suffer from this disease provides a genetic signpost of the fleet’s voyages.  Where Machado-Joseph disease exists, there is corroborative evidence of ‘Chinese’ DNA amongst the local people (see Annex)

How this discovery came about

Mr Jerry Warsing who lives in Crow, Virginia, USA was contacted by a leader of a local Indian people, the Melungeons, to research into why the Melungeon people of West Virginia have such a high incidence of Machado-Joseph disease.

The established view at that time (2000) was that Portuguese from the Azores, where the disease was said to originate, carried it to Virginia.  However when Jerry Warsing researched further, he found that the disease appeared in Yunnan before Portugal and moreover their appeared to be no records that the Portuguese had reached Virginia and spread it to the Melungeons. This line of evidence led him to Zheng He’s voyages.

By 2002 Jerry Warsing had come to the conclusion that a huge Chinese fleet had spread the disease around the world in the 1430’s.  He decided to write a book about the subject when he heard (Jan 2003) The Diane Rehm show on NPR on which Gavin Menzies was a guest.  On the 7th and 8th February 2003 Jerry Warsing and Gavin Menzies met in Virginia and exchanged research notes.

The Disease

Machado-Joseph disease is a fatal genetic disorder of the nervous system that cripples and paralyses while leaving the intellect intact.  The disease is characterised by weakness in the arms and legs and general loss of control of movement – often characterised as being similar to drunkenness.  The disease is named after Antone Joseph, a Portuguese sailor from the Azores, who emigrated to California.

Machado-Joseph disease is an autosomal dominant disorder, which means each child of an affected parent has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the defective gene.  People at risk who escape the disease will not pass it on to their children or to future generations for the disease does not skip generations.  The disease thus shows a direct link from parent to child, which makes tracing hereditary relatively simple.

Origins of the Disease

Machado-Joseph disease was first described in the west among immigrants from the Azores to North America especially those from the Islands of Flores and Sao Miguel.  It was thought the mutation originated in mainland Portugal and was carried to the Azores when the Portuguese discovered the islands in the 1430’s.  It was then carried by the Portuguese along the sea routes down the coast of Africa to India, China, Brazil, the Yemen, Japan and to the Aborigines of NW Australia.  Jerry Warsing’s evidence is that the disease was prevalent in Yunnan before the Portuguese got there; as it was amongst the aborigines of Australia and in the Yemen.  Thus the Portuguese could not have spread the disease to China – it must be the other way round.

Chinese in the Azores – 1421-1470’s

Gavin Menzies contends in his book that a squadron from Zheng He’s Fleets reached the Azores in 1422 and sets out the evidence in his book – not least that Columbus reported drowned Chinese at Flores, the ancient stone harbour at Corvo and the statue of a horseman which the first Portuguese found on the summit of Corvo.  The highest incidence of disease is found in Flores – the island furthest away from Portugal and last colonized.  Why is the disease not most prevalent amongst the people of the islands first colonized and nearest to Portugal?  Flores is the island nearest to America and one of the two islands of which there is evidence of a Chinese presence on the 1421-22 voyage.

Spread of disease by the Chinese

All of the places where Machado-Joseph was found, including mountains of the Yemen (Tailz) were visited by the Chinese fleet (Evidence of Ibn Tagri Birdi in Al Nujum, a history of Egypt, and evidence of Ma Huan, travelling on to Mecca).  The fleet also visited Brazil, the Malabar Coast of India, Japan, Darwin, California and New England.

In every country that Machado-Joseph disease has been found, there is corroborative evidence of ‘Chinese DNA’ amongst the native peoples.

(v)   Tokelau
(Dr Olympio da Fonseca). This highly distinctive infection was found in 1928 amongst Native Indian peoples of the Mato Grosso area of Brasil. These people had lived isolated from Europeans for centuries. This endemic parasitic disease has such a unique appearance that ancient narrators and naturalists referred to it even if they were not medical experts. The centre of tokelau’s sphere of affliction is the Malayan peninsular. It is found on the southern coast of China in the Honnan province, the coasts and hinterland of Indochina (Cambodia, Thailand, Annam, Vietnam) to the Yunnan province of China, Burma and Bangladesh. It is prevalent across the Pacific – Formosa, Mariannas, Moluccas, Gilbert and Marshall groups, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga groups, Tokelau Islands, Society and Celebes groups, Solomons and Loyalty Islands, Sumatra and New Guinea – all places visited by Chinese fleets. It is the author’s contention that the Chinese also sailed down the Amazon to the Mato Grosso.

(vi)   Smallpox
(Jonathan F Ormes and Chris Spedding). The Native American population was decimated by smallpox before most of them had ever seen a European. How was it brought to the Americas?

(vii)   Paragonimus Westermani – lung fluke
(Dr John S Marr). As with ‘Chinese’ DNA, hookworm, roundworm, Machado Joseph disease and tokelau, this is common in China and South America.

(viii) Yersinia Pestis – Bubonic plague
How did bubonic plague, which is originally endemic to wild animals in Asia, and jumped from there to rodents in urban areas, also became endemic among certain wild animals (squirrels, etc.) in the Western U.S.A. ?   Could Yersinia pestis have arrived in the New World in early times via rats (and their fleas) leaving Chinese ships anchored along our coasts? – Patricia Nell Warren

ix) Helicobacter Pylori  – Scientific American, Feb 2005 article on Helicobacter Pylori (the stomach ulcer bacteria) mentions a unique cluster of the “East Asian” s1c strain inland along the Orinoco River. Otherwise, the coastal areas of South America all show the Iberian strain. The authors of the article were confident the presence in an Amazonian population of the East Asian strain of H. Pylori in Venezuela pre-dated European contact and that H. Pylori “can better elucidate the history of population movements than can studies of human mitochondrial DNA.” They also concluded that the presence of s1c is a remnant of Bering Straight migration. (Robert Ammirati)

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