A notable interaction between European settlers and indigenous peoples throughout history is spreading diseases native people have no immunity to. Why was the spread of indigenous diseases to European settlers much less widespread/well known?

Question

A notable interaction between European settlers and indigenous peoples throughout history is spreading diseases native people have no immunity to. Why was the spread of indigenous diseases to European settlers much less widespread/well known?

In: 0

Answer 1

Most of the more significant diseases of that era are due to domesticated animals shitting in the water used for human populations. Native Americans broadly didn’t rely on domestication to the same degree as people in the Old World, and as a result they didn’t generate much in the way of diseases to infect the Old Worlder’s with.

The disease of note, though, is Smallpox, which is viral and spread by rodents as opposed to domesticated animals, and which broadly only seems to have existed in the Old World prior to European contact with the Americas. Smallpox hadn’t really previously existed, and as a result the Natives had absolutely no resistance to it, hence why Smallpox alone obliterated most of the Amerindian populations. There just wasn’t a comparable New World disease for the Old World population to catch.