Essay On Native American Disease

The population of Native American was estimated to be between 30-100 million people. The Eurasian continent included many domesticated animals, large animals, such as cows, horses’ oxen; Etc. The Americas, by contrast lacked these large domesticable animals and concomitant diseases. These animals offered a lot of great benefits, but also transmitted all types of diseases to the farmers. In the 14th century The Black Plague devastated their population, which killed 90 percent of their people. The devastating disease only went in one direction from Eurasia to the Americas. Columbus arrival in 1492 suddenly collided with 12,000 years of American isolation from Eurasian. The European were not affected by the disease as much as the Native American because they had a robust immune system due to the fact that they have been the caretakers of domesticated animals for thousands of years, and had somewhat grown immune to the common diseases that accompanied the domestication. Natives American on the other hand had very limited exposure to the spread of the diseases, so it was easy for the to catch these types of diseases.

The first factors that caused diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, tuberculosis, and measles to be more present in North America before European contact
When so many humans live together in relatively close quarters, particularly with lack of good, or any, sewage systems, disease spreads quickly with the general population continually getting exposed to numerous bacterium. The Europeans’ bodies had to adapt to dealing with many of those diseases, and for those who survived, their immune systems thrived as a result. All of these things resulted in Europeans being regularly exposed to many more viruses than Native Americans were. The Europeans’ immune systems simply developed to ward off the worst of some of the nastier diseases that disabled entire Native American