Human parasites in the Roman World: health consequences of conquering an empire

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It makes sense - there’s people, non-human animals, and crops being shared back and forth; anything piggybacking on those three, such as parasites, would have an easier time spreading out.

  It’s also worth mentioning that Roman baths were… well, disgusting. More likely to spread filth than get rid of it. Basically, if you were to join the bath with a dirty butthole, well, now everyone joining it with/after you will share your poop bacteria or parasites! This is from a culture before we had a good idea on how diseases happen.

  Additionally they had a fair bit of prejudice interfering on their sanitary practices. For example, a civilised Roman is supposed to smear olive oil over their body and scrape it off with a strigil; unlike, for example, the “ooga booga” (Celts) up north who’d use balls made of animal fat cooked with ashes. We know those balls nowadays by names like “soap”, by the way.

  It’s also understandable that garum spread fish parasites. Garum needs to be made with uncooked fish, since the fish’s digestive enzymes plays a role breaking down its own flesh, and cooking those enzymes would denature them (so they’d stop working). Since garum is extremely salty odds are that it killed a lot of stuff, but not anything that is able to form cysts, protecting itself from the brine.

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