Animal-to-human transmission of Mycobacterium pinnipedii

Extract: Mycobacterium pinnipedii, the known causative agent of tuberculosis (TB) in marine mammals, was only recognised as a member of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex in 2003 [1] and is believed to cause TB in several species, including nonmarine mammals [2, 3] and even humans [4]. The assumption of zoonotic transmission has been strongly reinforced by a disruptive study published in 2014 by a team of archaeologists from Tübingen, Germany [5]. Based on archaeological and genomic investigations on millennial human skeletons, the authors implicated sea mammals infected with M. pinnipedii as a source of New World human TB. Considering that this phenomenon pre-dates the human migrations to South America by several centuries, they refuted the previous scientific hypothesis of TB driven by human contact [6].