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.
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