Were the endemic diseases just less severe?
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There is a chance they did with some diseases. That being said:
The Americas had overal less dense population centres and less lifestock. Diseases could spread so rapidly and effectively in the old world because there were large trading networks and cities to take hold in. Smaller population centre are less sensitive to plagues. They are more likely, but definetly not guaranteed, to burn out before they become problematic.
Lifestock is the other main factor. As happend with covid, swineflu and is now the possible case with birdflu these things develop by jumping from host species to host species. A cold for a bird can become a terrible disease in humans and when it first starts spreading it might only go from animal to human but eventually you get human – human transfer. This is when real fast spreading can begin and it has potential to become a plague.
In the Americas there were native dogs, Lamas, Alpaca’s, some birds and guineapigs. In the old world, herds of cows, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, duck, horses and donkeys etc. etc. etc. were present in large numbers close to humans since ancient times. Often people and animals lived very close to eachother, in the same house or even in the same room. Thats like a petridish for diseases to jump from animal to human.
On top of what others have said, in many places disease was a very real concern for Western Europeans. Well into the 19th century, diseases like yellow fever and malaria made it incredibly dangerous for Europeans to travel through places like Africa or even India.
In India for example, the British spent 100 years building up Calcutta as a center of trade before they really began conquering the country. But for all those years, the white population of Calcutta was extremely low (like 1000 people) because the risk of dying of disease was so high. The reward was great as well, so people literally got rich or died trying.
It took the invention of things like anti-malarial medications to really allow the full-scale rapid colonization of whole swathes of Africa and Asia that was seen in the 1800s
The new world was isolated from the rest of the world so people there never developed immunities to the many diseases that circulated in the old world.
Plus new world folks didn’t domesticate as hard as old world, so disease didn’t spread through animals.
Basically, they were too clean
If I remember correctly though they brought back some STDs which were not as lethal but still a major disruption in Europe then.
Endemic Caribbean diseases had yuuuuge impacts on the Europeans and Africans that came/were taken to the islands.
Europeans lived with and amongst our beasts of burden in cities. The American cultures did not. So diseases which passed from animal to human was relatively rare.
Diseases kill their prey only by accident. Ideally they live inside, and feed on the host for years and decades. But a disease which knows how to feed on a pig just right, keeping it healthy enough to sustain the disease. May inadvertently kill a human host, or any other animal for that matter.
Lots of different answers in these comments. Let me point out something I didn’t see mentioned.
There WERE in fact diseases that the Europeans were not accustomed to. The mortality rate of new colonies was very high, with many colonies disappearing completely. Some of these colonies disappeared and we don’t know what happened, but I think the simplest answer was they were wiped out by disease.
People do not realize how dangerous bacteria used to be. IIRC during WWI bacteria killed more people than bullets. Part of it was harsh conditions and battle wounds, but part of it was the mass migrations of soldiers spreading their disease.
The thing was, Europeans who got disease in the US would most likely die or recover before they could bring them back to Europe.
I say this not in inclusion, but in addition to some of the things some of the other commenters have said.
This question is based on a common misunderstanding of the history of American colonialism. Let’s break it down:
1. Death by disease alone: the popular understanding of colonial history proposes that upon European arrival, native Americans with no suitable antibodies died in droves to epidemics. This is a half-truth, in a similar vain as saying that most people in Nazi concentration camps died of disease, the reality is, while there were cases in which natives were uniquely susceptible and would suffer epidemics even before direct contact with Europeans due to livestock, these weren’t the main drivers of mortality. The main reason native Americans were dying off were the conditions imposed upon them when Europeans waged genocidal wars against them. A noteworthy example is the smallpox epidemic during the siege of Tenochtitlán, in which the Spanish and their allies cut off the clean water supply to the city. Smallpox was bad, sure, but the lack of water made what would have otherwise been a “regular” epidemic into a catastrophic mortality event. For further reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/s/1HuNUeHmrM
2. The diseases that caused mortality were European: this may come as a surprise, given how often we hear about smallpox and other diseases, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The two biggest epidemics in New Spain for example, were the result of cocoliztli, an as of yet not fully identified disease that we don’t know the origin of, although there has been wvidence supporting a Native American origin.
3. Europeans weren’t getting sick: this is a case of survivorship bias. Europeans who went to the Americas would die in droves. You don’t hear about them because they, well, died. Even Thanksgiving is partially about how tough it was for colonists to survive. Further reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/s/RZdHZcKjk6
Can I introduce you to a little gem called syphilis?
It has killed millions, with the true number probably impossible to know.
I have a simple theory. The Europeans that reacted badly to diseases died before they got back to Europe.
However, I guess the survivors could still be carriers of these diseases
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