News : Ancient bones could help combat TB, say scientists

By Ori Lewis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A team of German, Israeli and Palestinian researchers is studying ancient bones found in the biblical city of Jericho for clues that could help scientists combat tuberculosis.

"We see a re-emerging wave of tuberculosis all over the world and ... perhaps learning from the past will help us understand the present," Andreas Nerlich, professor of pathology at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians University said on Monday.

Nerlich and other researchers in the team have begun studying 6,000-year-old bones unearthed in Jericho more than a half-century ago by British anthropologist Kathleen Kenyon, in what is now the occupied West Bank.

Many of the bones show signs of tuberculosis, suggesting the disease afflicted a significant proportion of the population of the ancient world.

Experts believe the infectious bacterial disease, which usually attacks the lungs, could have originated about 10,000 years ago in the first villages and small towns in an area stretching from the Gulf through the Nile delta.

Researchers said preliminary work suggests there is sufficient DNA in the bone samples to provide clues to how tuberculosis evolves and help experts find new ways to fight it.

Ziad Abdeen, a Palestinian who heads the nutrition and health research institute at al-Quds University near Jerusalem, said the project shows how Israeli and Palestinian academics had learned to cooperate, while politicians still had not.

Mark Spigelman, professor of paleopathology at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and head of the Israeli team, said the project was one of the school's 11 joint projects with al-Quds.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller)