It is widely known that upon contact with new civilization, the indigionous people can be wiped out because they are not immune to our sicknesses; wouldn’t they also have some illness that europeans aren’t immune to?
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I answered a similar question on r/Askhistorians some time ago. Here is the link:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmjjt6/we_often_hear_of_how_old_world_diseases_brought/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmjjt6/we_often_hear_of_how_old_world_diseases_brought/)
If you don’t want to bother with the long version, here is the slightly shorter version.
1. Europeans were actually much, much less healthy than people assume. Smallpox, plague, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid etc. were still very busy killing people in Europe (and Asia and Africa) at the time of contact.
2. When Europeans went places with diseases that were unfamiliar to them (such as Africa, where they encountered malaria and yellow fever), they died like flies. They were not at all uniquely healthy.
3. Diseases show up and spread more commonly in cities (due to crowding encouraging the transmission of disease, plus sanitation problems) and where people have lots of domestic animals. The New World had fewer cities and fewer domesticated animals. (And where you do find cities, such as precontact Teotihuacan, you also find higher rates of disease).
4. Smallpox (the biggest killer of Native Americans) is a weird and deadly thing. There were no particularly useful medicines against it, and no vaccines in the 1500s and 1600s. Everyone (European, Native American, African, Asian) was born 100% fully susceptible to it. If you contracted it, you might well die. But if you survived it, you would be immune and could never contract it again. This fact mattered A LOT when Europeans arrived in America. Here’s why:
1. Smallpox, in Europe, was always travelling around, and most Europeans would contract it in childhood. A lot of them would die! This was not a harmless disease by any stretch of the imagination. But everyone who survived it was immune forever. What this meant, was that, if you were a European and you contracted smallpox, you would have family and friends who had already survived it and were immune. They could safely bring you food and water, make you drink some broth, and make sure that the fire didn’t go out. You might die anyway, but at least you would have a chance to survive.
2. Smallpox did not exist in the Americas before contact. It is so contagious, and so deadly that when it struck, virtually everybody in a community might fall sick at the same time. So if you lived in a village of three hundred people, and everyone got sick at once, people who might have survived with simple nursing care might die because (on top of the disease) they were also weakened by hunger, thirst, and cold. This might also lead to future problems: if everyone was sick when the crops were supposed to be planted or harvested, for example, the population might face hunger or malnutrition in the following months — which would set them up poorly for any later round of disease.
5. Some diseases actually did make their way from the Americas to the Old World. Syphilis might be one (although there is a huge debate on this). But two others, Chagas’ disease and leishmaniasis, definitely have a New World origin, and both continue to be a major threat globally. Most Americans have never heard of them, because they are not really a problem in the United States. But in Africa, India, and elsewhere, they are very real diseases.
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