eli5: Why Weren’t European Colonizers As Impacted By New World Diseases as The Natives were by European Diseases?
In: Biology
As others have said the new world didn’t have many disease reservoirs that could affect the colonists. However, in West Africa, so many Europeans died of disease that the region was once referred to as “The White Man’s Grave”
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I’m going to go against the grain here and say that you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective and that the *Guns, Germs & Steel* thesis has been questioned quite severly in the decades since it’s publication.
/u/anthropology_nerd has this to say:
>[…] I want to briefly add that current scholarship is stepping back from assuming universal catastrophic demographic decline from introduced infectious diseases in the years immediately following contact. Many factors, not just introduced pathogens, influenced Native American population dynamics in the years following contact.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/417t1w/disease_in_the_new_world/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/417t1w/disease_in_the_new_world/)
Your question, OP, is the wrong question to ask.
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