Scientists have uncovered the oldest known genome of the bacterium responsible for syphilis, revealing a previously unknown lineage that existed thousands of years ago in the Americas.

In the last days of the 1400s, a terrible epidemic swept through Europe. Men and women spiked sudden fevers. Their joints ached, and they broke out in rashes that ripened into bursting boils. Ulcers ...

Syphilis has been infecting people for centuries, and many researchers have tried to pinpoint the part of the world where the bacterium that causes the disease first appeared, before spreading across ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The first known outbreak of syphilis in Europe began at the turn of the 16th century, but on the distant continent of South ...

Did Columbus and his men introduce the syphilis pathogen into Renaissance Europe after contracting it during their voyage to the New World? Or does syphilis have a much longer history in the Old World ...

In the spring of 1495, the French army, under the reign of Charles VIII, faced an unexpected enemy. Soldiers weren’t battling an advancing foe but rather a mysterious and grotesque disease. What began ...

In 1494, just after Columbus' first voyage to the New World, historical accounts in Europe describe a debilitating epidemic of a previously unrecorded disease that we know now as syphilis. That timing ...

A cache of documents related to the Tuskegee syphilis study — a 40-year experiment that tracked infected Black men without treating them — has been digitized for public use, the National Library of ...

It is known that syphilis rates have varied much between different countries and populations over the past 100 years. A new study collates a history of the disease and finds that while rates dropped ...

Genital ulcers could be one of many sexually transmitted diseases or an infection that is not transmitted by sex. An expert walks you through a case. This is the first of a three-part series on ...