Study: Korean Mummy With Hep B

Transport yourself back 500 years ago to modern South Korea.  You have been commissioned to study the ancient burial rituals of the Neo-Confucianist Joseon Dynasty.  In traditional garb, you attend the mourning ceremony of a young child, his yellow tinted body lay atop large blocks of ice.  

You immediately think, he must have died of hepatitis B, but the family has no inkling what hepatitis is.  Fluent in their dialect (good think you bought those tapes), and posing as a healer, you begin to ask them details of their loved one's final days.

This is exactly what modern day researches from Seoul and Jerusalem are doing, but at a finer scale.  Using Korean mummies hundreds of years old, Prof. Mark Spigelman of the Hebrew University and Prof. Dong Hoon Shin of Seoul National University are hoping to answer some interesting and crucial questions concerning the evolution of diseases.



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