article_snippet.sent: Geneticists led by scientists at the University of Warwick gave us sanitation, wine, aqueducts and roads, but it seems the Romans also gave us one more addition to the list - tuberculosis.
article_snippet.sent: those found to have been infected with tuberculosis by the researchers say the strains of TB those found to have been infected with tuberculosis by the researchers found all evolved from a single germ that had began infecting people during the late Roman period.
article_snippet.sent: It is the first evidence that mixed infections of multiple strains of TB were common in the 18th Century.
article_snippet.sent: The researchers found that all of multiple strains of TB belonged to a lineage of Tuberculosis bacteria known as Lineage 4, which still causes more than a million TB cases a year in Europe and America.
article_snippet.sent: Tuberculosis is caused by Tuberculosis.
article_snippet.sent: The researchers found that they all seemed to stem from a single strain of tuberculosis that was in existence between 396CE-470CE.
article_snippet.sent: The Roman dating supports recent scientific estimates that tuberculosis first emerged about 6,000 years ago, although some have suggested tuberculosis is tens of thousands of years old.
article_snippet.sent: Professor Pallen, who conducted the work along with researchers at the University Birmingham, University College London, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, said: 'Microbiological analysis of samples from contemporary TB patients usually report a single strain of tuberculosis per patient. '
article_snippet.sent: By contrast, five of the eight bodies in our study yielded more than one type of tuberculosis - remarkably, from one individual, our obtained evidence of three distinct strains.'