Dysentery

The toilet seat taken from the House of Ahiel, excavated in the Old City of Jerusalem. A domestic building made up of seven rooms, it would have housed an upper-class family at the time. Date of construction is hard to pin down, with some placing it around the 8th century BCE. Credit: F. Vukasavovic A new analysis of ancient feces taken from two Jerusalem latrines dating back to the biblical Kingdom of Judah has uncovered…

Photo: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sounding the alarm over a diarrhea-causing superbug. The CDC’s data shows a noticeable rise in extensively drug-resistant strains of Shigella bacteria over the past half-decade. Though these infections are typically not severe, antibiotics are needed to prevent and treat life-threatening cases, and the bacteria can pass on their resistance genes to other troublesome germs.Shigella is one of the most common sources of…

Robby Copeland, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Whatever disease killed Edward the Black Prince—heir apparent to the English throne in the mid 1300s, and heralded as the greatest English soldier ever to have lived—is unlikely to have been chronic dysentery, as is commonly believed, writes a military expert in the journal BMJ Military Health. …

Image via The Gaming Historian/YouTube. “You have died of dysentery” is a phrase that fans of the videogame The Oregon Trail will be familiar with — but is it destined to be a song lyric, too? That’s the question raised by the news that a musical movie based on The Oregon Trail is in the works. Originally created in 1971, The Oregon Trail is a simulation of the pioneer days when people traveled to newly stolen — ahem, “acquired” — U.S. territories via the titular trail that stretched from Missouri to Oregon.…