Urbanism and Disease

My original dissertation idea was to look at the way that living in urbanized Rome in the Imperial period affected people's skeletons. Although I eventually narrowed my research focus to migration, which was an important part of urbanization, I did collect pathological data in an attempt to see what the disease load was of the urban Roman population. I haven't yet read the full article, but mainstream media has picked up on the implications of research linking urbanization and resistance to tuberculosis published in an article in Evolution entitled "Ancient urbanisation predicts genetic resistance to tuberculosis." It seems that, although the introduction of cattle farming played a role in humans' developing genetic resistance to TB, those people who lived in long-term, permanent, urbanized settlements had a much higher likelihood of possessing the necessary alleles for resistance to TB (and the related disease leprosy, both of which are caused by Mycobacterium) than did people not from urbanized areas.

This result is pretty cool in that it suggests that the complete lack of evidence of TB and leprosy in the Roman populations I examined may not be unusual. By Imperial times, Rome had been urbanized for centuries, and people had been coming from all over the Empire, bringing in new diseases but also new alleles, so possibly new resistance to endemic diseases. I've said before that I'd love to do some sort of disease ecology study in Rome, particularly with respect to malaria. The study cited above appears to have used DNA analysis of modern people, so I'm wondering if there is a possibility of doing the same kind of study on ancient people (aside from the fact that aDNA analysis is ridiculously expensive).