Scientists may have come across the world's oldest case of an infectious, parasitic worm in a 6,200-year-old skeleton.
An egg belonging to the trematode flatworm, which infects some 200 million people around the world, was found in the abdomen of a child buried in northern Syria near the Euphrates River, Medical News Today reported.
The findings were published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Experts say the child came in contact with the egg during a time irrigation systems for farming were being developed, which means people would have spent time in warm water where the flatworm breeds.
Once in the water, infection can occur when a flatworm jumps from the water snail it lives in and onto a human. From there it burrows into the skin and causes schistosomiasis, a disease that can lead to kidney failure and bladder cancer.
"The invention of irrigation was a major technological breakthrough (but) it had unintended consequences," Gil Stein, a Near Eastern archaeology professor from the University of Chicago who co-wrote the report, told the Associated Press. "A more reliable food supply came at the cost of more disease."
According to the World Health Organization, schistosomiais commonly sickens people in poor communities located in tropical areas. The flatworm is known to make its way to a person's bladder, kidneys and intestines where it can live for years. Symptoms of the disease include fever, vomiting, abdominal pain and paralysis in the legs.
Scientists believe the ancient irrigation systems used for framing could have unintentionally caused the disease to spread globally. Even with modern irrigation systems, such as dams in Africa, the parasite-infected water snails still make their way into the water supply.
"In many parts of Africa, someone clever decides to put in a dam or an artificial water source and then 10 years later, everyone's getting schistosomiasis," Piers Mitchell, who also worked on the report, told the AP.
One solution is to "use different approaches to water management to prevent people wading in these water sources," Mitchell told MNT. "That would break the cycle of disease spread."
Mitchell and his colleagues hope to conduct future excavations at the skeleton's grave site in Syria to study how ancient societies contributed to modern diseases, MNT reported.
