I have been thinking about Christopher on this day.  It is thought that he had reactive arthritis and ultimately died of it.  He developed uveitis and arthritis in 1493, returning from the Americas. He was 41 years old.  It is thought that he was HLA-B27 positive and developed a gastrointestinal illness which triggered this, both just like in me.  Unfortunately for him there was no effective treatment, and he went on to have relapses which increased in duration and severity until he ultimately died with cardiac complications of his disease at age 54.  Thankfully for me, I was treated with prednisone, then Remicade and now remain on sulfasalazine to control my disease.  Unfortunately since this is a rare disease there is very little research into it, like other rare diseases.  Fortunately, for me anyway, there is research in other rheumatologist diseases (ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis) that show tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors are effective against those conditions and certainly helped me.  With it, I was able to get off prednisone (it took 4 years) and now am just on the sulfasalazine.  But other rare diseases do not benefit from research into somewhat similar less rare diseases like mine.  Rare diseases affecting 25-30 million Americans and disproportionately affect pediatric patients.  90% of these diseases do not have an FDA approved treatment for them (including mine).  These diseases deserve have research to develop effective treatments like more common diseases.  So no one needs to suffer like Christopher Columbus did.  I realize he did horrible things, but that doesn’t negate his suffering.

P.S. Reactive arthritis was called Reiter’s Syndrome, including when I was in medical school.  He described the disease in a patient in World War I.  But he conducted medical experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp resulting in many deaths. In 1977, a group of doctors began a campaign to replace the term Reiter’s syndrome with reactive arthritis.In 2003, a group of rheumatology journal editors decided against continued use of the eponym in their journals. The official retraction from the doctors who originally proposed the eponym came in 2009.  Thankfully for me by the time I was diagnosed in 2020, the name of my disease no longer honored a criminal.

P.P.S.  I do realize that it is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  And I acknowledge the importance of this day.  But my post office is closed because of Columbus Day which got my thinking about Christopher and heading down this rabbit hole.