Near the end of his reign, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led an army of over half a million men in an invasion of Russia in 1812. Six months later, after the army was forced to retreat, an estimated tens of thousands of his soldiers made it back to France.
Known as one of the costliest wars in history, the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers has been attributed to battle, as well as starvation, cold and a typhus epidemic that broke out.
Now, researchers have found evidence in the DNA remains of the soldiers that there may have been multiple diseases that devastated the army, including two previously undetected types of bacteria. The study was published Friday in the journal Current Biology.
“Previously, we just thought that there was one infectious disease that decimated the Napoleon army — the typhus,” said lead author Rémi Barbieri, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur in Paris who currently holds a postdoctoral position at Estonia’s University of Tartu. Instead, the researchers found something unexpected, opening the door to potentially uncovering other infectious diseases that could have contributed to the soldiers’ deaths, he added.
The researchers found the pathogens — Salmonella enterica and Borrelia recurrentis, bacteria that cause paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever, respectively — by analyzing teeth from the fallen soldiers who were found in a mass grave uncovered in 2001 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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