The oldest known case of the disease was found in a 6-year-old boy who died around 550 CE.
and humans, the pathogen’s only host, is probably much older than that, says Meriam Guellil, a paleogeneticist at the University of Tartu in Estonia.. He probably contracted the Hib infection first, Guellil and colleagues say. While respiratory infections rarely leave marks, the boy’s kneecaps had fused to the thighbones above them. Such damage can happen when Hib escapes the respiratory system and infects joints, which would have taken weeks.
This boy was already quite ill when he caughtIn medieval England, a 6-year-old boy’s bout with a serious bacterial infection probably caused the fusion between this fragment of his thigh bone with the bit of his kneecap still present at the top .This kind of research opens a window into how pathogens evolve to start pandemics or die out over thousands to millions of years.