The Latin poet Marco Anneo Lucano may have been the first to describe a case of Ebola. This is the hypothesis made on the pages of the Journal of Virology and Viral Diseases by two Italian researchers, from the University of Guglielmo Marconi and from La Sapienza University of Rome.
The two scholars have analyzed in detail the civil Bellum, also known as Pharsalia, which tells of the civil war that opposed Caesar to Pompey and which culminated in the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC. In book IX, Giovanni Meledandri and Leonardo Borgese explain, “is inserted a broad and detailed description of a serious epidemic episode that struck the Roman soldiers during their long journey to Africa. The explanations that Lucano provides are obviously compatible with the knowledge of the time “. The deaths are attributed, in fact, to the bites of different types of snakes. However, the poet’s verses contain details that can be perfectly superimposed on the symptoms of hemorrhagic fever due to the Ebola virus.
“Bloody tears would be conjunctival hemorrhages; the blood that comes out of every orifice and, in particular, the bleeding from the mouth and nose, are epistaxis, hematuria, hematemesis and melaena, all frequent in subjects suffering from Ebola hemorrhagic fever”, the researchers write.
“The expression ‘totum est pro vulnere corpus’ (his whole body is a wound) seems to sum up and show the very essence of Ebolavirus infection, which is capable of inhibiting cell wall binding in almost all tissues body causing generalized bleeding “.
To corroborate the researchers’ hypothesis, also the location of the Roman soldiers, who, having arrived in Africa to fight Pompey, could have gone up the Nile course, probably going as far as the equatorial areas where the virus would have been identified two thousand years later. (HANDLE).
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Source From: Ansa
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