The pitted and roughened surfaces of the bones also indicate that the young woman had syphilis, which is caused by the bacteria Treponema pallidum.Simon Mays, who led the team, says that a second skeleton unearthed from the site of the Ipswich Blackfriars friary also shows the signs of syphilitic infection, although the dating of these bones place them between 1440 and 1620, perhaps after the return of Columbus."These cases add to a small but growing body of palaeopathological data which indicates that treponemal disease [syphilis] was present in Europe prior to Columbus's voyages to the New World," Dr Mays said.One of the difficulties of analysing old bones for signs of syphilis is that such studies cannot distinguish between the two principal forms of the infection: the venereal disease caught from sexual intercourse and the closely related illness known as endemic syphilis, which is transmitted via skin contact and is more common among children.Dr Mays, however, believes that the Essex girl almost certainly suffered from venereal syphilis. "Endemic syphilis is passed via body contact in populations living under unhygienic conditions. Today, it is found mainly in warm, dry regions of the developing world," he said.If the Essex girl had suffered from endemic syphilis caught when she was a child, this should have shown up in a tendency for her bones to be bowed as a result of abnormal development. The absence of such bowing indicates that she had venereal syphilis, he said."The present palaeopathological cases clearly pre-date 1493 and indicate that the Columbian hypothesis for the origin of European treponemal disease cannot be sustained," Dr Mays said. It is just possible that syphilis may have been brought to medieval Europe by the Vikings, who were known to have visited North America and may have had contacts with the natives.However, Dr Mays believes another more likely scenario is that syphilis was brought to Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries by the crusaders having contact with people from south-west Asia. "During this time, European crusaders and their entourages, in addition to religious pilgrims, would have had substantial contact with Middle Eastern populations in areas associated with treponemal infection," he said.. Channel 4 has revealed a clever twist in the Big Brother format which, it hopes, will help the show to beat off the challenge from ITV's Survivor to become Britain's most talked about television programme.
Channel 4 has revealed a clever twist in the Big Brother format which, it hopes, will help the show to beat off the challenge from ITV's Survivor to become Britain's most talked about television programme. A new "Big Brother election" was launched on the first Big Brother programme last night, and will allow viewers to vote a new contestant into the Big Brother house. On 8 June he or she will replace the first person to be evicted. In an effort to make the new Big Brother into a more interesting and varied format than the first series, the three hopefuls are not all standard heterosexual 20-somethings, but are Anne, a 45-year-old-grandmother, Josh a 32-year-old gay man and Natasha, a 27-year-old part-time model.One of the existing contestants, an airline steward called Brian, is gay so the audience will decide whether or not it wants to introduce the titillation factor of a possible gay romance into the unfolding Big Brother story.Channel 4 is desperate to follow up its headline-making first series with an equally controversial and audience-grabbing second one, but that is not easy and has already proved difficult for broadcasters in Spain and Holland.A Channel 4 insider said yesterday: "In the first series of Big Brother the ratings bumped along at the three-million mark, and it was only when the Nasty Nick story got going that the audience shot up to six million and the press went wild about the programme."It is in the nature of the Big Brother format that Channel 4, along with the rest of the country, has no idea at all over whether the second series contestants will be as compelling as the first, and will throw up gripping storylines. The channel has done its best to create the right conditions, however. The range of contestants is far wider than before, both in age and social background, and there is a strong emphasis on sex.Amma, a 22-year-old table dancer, for instance, lists her interests as "masturbation and painting dolls' house furniture", while aggressively blonde Helen, also 22, says she likes to cover herself in glitter and fluff and go dancing.But the programme makers are aware that in series one the most sexually provocative contestants, Nichola and Caroline, were voted off in the early stages.
It is likely that, if the second series is to throw up a "killer plotline" similar to the case of Nasty Nick, it will come from a more subtle source.Channel 4 executives argue that it is the unpredictable nature of Big Brother that makes it ground-breaking television, and that Survivor, which is made in advance and is edited, is a far more conventional format.At ITV, executives acknowledge that despite bucket-loads of hype, Survivor has got off to a shaky start with audiences falling as low as five million against a target of 12. "That is not terrible," said a senior source on Survivor, "but we do need to get it up to 10 to 12 million in the next week." Competitors agreed. "If they don't get the audience up to that level within a week," said a BBC executive, "you can be sure ITV will cut its losses and take the show out of prime time. ITV is not a sentimental channel." Should that happen, the loss of face and humiliation for ITV bosses would be immense.The Survivor source argued that, in the end, Survivor will have the edge because the edited drama is more intense than the watching-paint-dry content of much of Big Brother.But some ITV insiders feel that the channel has not managed the Survivor media campaign well. "The slogan You don't win, you survive is bollocks," says a senior source.
