Pathogenesis of Chlamydia trachomatis in Humans

Chlamydia: A Disease without a History

“…Chlamydia as an STI is a disease without a history in two senses: first, it became a clinical entity only in the 1970s, and, second, its medical and social history has still to be written-an absence this chapter begins to correct. 7 Its seeming novelty in the 1970s prompts the question, Was it an infection newly arrived in humans, or had it always been present and was now being recognized for the first time? 8 This is a question that can only be answered, not by a medical historian but by investigations of past populations by epidemiologists, pathologists, and, perhaps most likely, by archaeologists using genomics.…”