I have frequently heard about how smallpox devastated the new world’s indigenous populations during the beginning of colonization because they had no natural immunity. What I don’t understand is how did the reverse not happen. I naively assume indigenous diseases would impact Europeans and probably be brought back to Europe but I have never read of this happening.
In: Biology
American diseases absolutely had an impact on Europeans during colonisation.
European colonists regularly got sick, likely including all sorts of new diseases from North America – it is harder to know which ones because they didn’t have the bring the best medical researchers with them; people got sick, many died, but that was that – there were fewer people to investigate which disease it was. And some of these diseases did make it back to Europe – the most (in)famous being syphilis, which probably originated in the Americas and was seriously deadly when first brought to Europe in the 1490s.
There are a few factors that led to this not being quite as dramatic:
* Europeans already had contact with most of the world’s human population. They had had a lot of pandemics and epidemics, of European, Asian, African etc. diseases. Whereas the American populations were pretty well isolated from the rest of the world. The Europeans had more stuff to spread,
* in terms of raw numbers, it was easier for European diseases to spread in North American populations that vice versa. Initially you had smaller European settlements, where if one small group got wiped out by a disease that would be the end of the story, whereas in the larger Native settlements diseases had a lot more room to spread and cause havoc,
* Europeans could bring their diseases to the Americas when they travelled there – but any infection too dramatic would have a hard time being brought back to Europe by the travelling Europeans as they would be dead or too sick to travel.
* the part we’re not really supposed to talk about; genocide. Sicknesses cause more problems for populations that are ‘stressed’ (short on water, food, medicine, etc.). Early European colonies and expeditions definitely had this problem (and there are early expeditions where ~75% were wiped out by disease). But once established this was less of an issue for them. But as Europeans expanded into North America, driving back the Native populations, taking their land, food sources, water sources etc., that put increasing amounts of ‘stress’ on them, making them more vulnerable to diseases.
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