How did remote places in Asia and Africa not succumb to the same wave of disease and death that the Native Americans did?

Question

I’m not saying they weren’t affected at all, but something like 90% of Native Americans were wiped out while places like Japan and deep parts of the African interior didn’t suffer nearly as hard, even though they previously had basically no contact with Europe.

In: 1583

Answer 1

Starting in the early Edo period, a new Yokai (Demon) appeared in Japan: the [Korori](https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Korori?file=Korori.JPG). A tricky monster that breathed a foul breath spreading an invisible sickness that afflicted entire households and sometimes took whole villages.

We call it Cholera today, and the 1862 outbreak in Edo killed hundreds of thousands. It was brought entirely due to contact with traders from the west.

But of course it didn’t have the same total devastation effect that was seen in the Americas and there are a number of reasons for this.

Native Americans were uniquely susceptible to diseases from Eurasia because their immune systems were primed differently than Eurasian people’s. Specifically, when your immune system is developing your body can specialise in creating cells which are either extremely effective against microbes / infectious diseases, or against parasites like hookworms and tapeworms etc.

Native American immune systems were heavily primed against parasites, and weak against microbial diseases. Eurasian and African peoples, thanks to millennia of animal domestication and exposure to the many plagues that have swept across the continents are much more capable of dealing with microbial infection. So even in cases like Korori, you are looking at a group of people with a much better toolset to deal with that type of disease than the Native Americans had.

This is also why Europeans struggled where Native Americans didn’t when it comes to disease. The stereotype of the “lazy southerner” comes mostly due to the fatigue side effects of the [hookworm infections](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/) that were shockingly widespread in the US even into the 20th century.

edit: added links