Why didn’t diseases native to the Americas kill off European colonizers in large numbers?
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This is a really good question. The reason goes back to where Pandemics come from. I’m not a doctor so it’s likely that some of this will be wrong.
Essentially every speicies has their own diseases. We have the common cold. It’s really easy for our bodies to fight these off. Remember, these organisms don’t want us to die. Like almost everything else, their goal is to reproduce, and it’s pretty hard to reproduce in a dead body. When you get sick, the virus is trying to (usually) hijack your cells in its own special way, to make copies of itself. The “sick” feeling that you get is actually your body fighting it off.
The thing is that when an animal virus jumps over to humans, for example Covid-19 is from bats, it’s really bad for humans. The Covid virus is operating on bat rules, which in bats wouldn’t be that bad, but we aren’t bats so it is devistating to our bodies. We can come up with anti-bodies but it’s really difficult. Plus since our bodies have never experienced anything like this, it has a huge infection rate. This is what’s important. It’s why the Native Americans died so easily from the European diseases.
Now every time someone comes in contact with a sick animal, there is a very small chance that the virus will make the jump. This is because the virus is used to infecting its specific speicies. But every so often it happens. We can extrapolate from this. Since we know a rough estimate of how many animals are sick, and we know roughly how often we come in contact with those animals, we can estimate that a pandemic will happen every 100 years or so. The last major one happened in 1918 with the spanish flu, so we’re right on schedule.
Here’s the thing though, the worse conditions you live in, and the more contact you have with sick animals the more chances you have of the virus jumping. Like rolling 5 dice, eventually you’ll get a yahtzee. Think about the conditions the Europeans were living in. They had modern cities with high populations, but they also were by no means clean. Compare this to Native Americans. No big cities, plus they had religious beliefs that were nature centric, based on an idea that everything had its proper place. As a result their animals were often times kept seperate from the tribe.
Combined with the vast networks of trade that Europe and Asia had, this helped spread disease quickly. Those large sprawling trade networks was something the Natives just didn’t have. So even if there was a Pandemic it wouldn’t have spread very far.
This all results in the simple fact that, the reason they didn’t give the Europeans diseases was because they didn’t have any to give.
This is a real helpful video on this topic: https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
But the tl;dr version is that truly awful diseases like small pox(one of the major diseases used to kill native americans) really only pop up and continue to thrive when you have domesticated animals and high population density. Neither of which the native americans had a ton of.
As an additional factor, Europeans were well versed in biological warfare and utilized those principles to intentionally spread disease among native american populations(small pox infested blankets were given to native americans when the Europeans knew to burn them to prevent further spread)
There is one example of a disease going the other way – Columbus [brought back syphillis](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/case-closed-columbus/) from the Americas, and it did kill millions of Europeans.
Europeans were harder to make sick because they lived in dense cities under filthy conditions. As a result, they had experienced, or were carrying, many diseases. The native Americans didn’t have a diverse a disease history, living in relative isolation.
Most of the diseases the European brought to America were cattle related. In America there were non mass population of cattle, not even llamas, so American populations didn’t have any mass spreading disease to infect the Europeans
The short answer is that there simply weren’t that many in the new world, and they weren’t widely spread. Remember that Europe had already had several centuries of trade involving Asia, Africa, Scandinavia and many other regions. They had exposure and resistance to the illnesses of many regions by this point, where as the Native American populations had ranges of only several hundred miles at most, and only traded with a limited number of other tribes.
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