Sounds like there's still some debate going on, but an interesting development.
King Tutankhamun died from sickle-cell disease, not malaria, say experts. A team from Hamburg's Bernhard Noct Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNI) claim the disease is a far likelier cause of death than the combination of bone disorders and malaria put forward by Egyptian experts earlier this year.
The BNI team argues that theories offered by Egyptian experts, led by antiquities tsar Zahi Hawass, are based on data that can be interpreted otherwise. They say further analysis of the data will confirm or deny their work. Hawass' claim, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this February, and followed by a swarm of accompanying television shows, claimed King Tut suffered from Kohler's disease, a bone disorder prohibiting blood flow, before succumbing to malaria.
Multiple bone disorders, including one in Tutankhamun's left foot, led to the Kohler's diagnosis, while segments of a malarial parasite were found via DNA testing. Yet the BNI team claims the latter results are incorrect. “Malaria in combination with Köhler's disease causing Tutankhamun's early death seems unlikely to us,” say Prof Christian Meyer and Dr Christian Timmann.
