Native American Microbes

The exchange of ideas, cultures and goods also came with the exchange of microbes that started deadly diseases that killed many people who were unfamiliar to them.

By the late 15th century, Native Americans spread across the Americas in communities and also lived in flourishing civilizations, the Aztec and the Inca empire. There were around 100 million Native Americans, 25-30 million lived in the civilizations. The people in the Americas had wild game where they almost diminished the quantity by hunter-gatherer bands. Throughout North and South America, Native Americans farmed animals that were not traditional herd animals likely to give microbes to humans, such as turkeys, ducks, guinea pigs, llamas and alpacas.

The arrival of the Europeans
The first smallpox epidemic struck the empire in the 1520’s, and it killed around a third of its people and devastated Smallpox struck the empire. Killing around a third of its people and devastating the royal household. Emperor Huayna Capac, the absolute monarch, worshipped as the Sun God, died along with many military leaders, governors, and family members. The death of Huayna Capac’s son, Ninan Cucuchi, left the empire in disarray and triggered a war that ended in the lands being split. Pizarro and his men captured the Emperor Atahualpa without the loss of a single soldier. Once the emperor was captured, the battle was over. Pizarro held him for ransom, demanding money and wealth from the natives in return for his freedom. But He later had him executed the nice guy he was. The Spanish and the Native Americans believed that the diseases which killed around a third of the Native Americans while sparing the Spanish (who were immune after surviving childhood infections) were sent by an angry god as punishment for their misbehavior. Within the fifty years of Cortes’ arrival in central Mexico only one in ten Native Americans survived and the population declined from 30 to 3 million. These epidemics also happened in many other isolated communities throughout the world, such as the Aborigine and Maori people of Australia, or the Pacific Islanders and the
West Africa had many microbes as well, particularly those causing malaria and yellow fever.The new microbes attacked both the Native Americans and the Europeans viciously. African slaves did not die as rapidly and the Native Americans and soon came to outnumber them in many ways. Malaria parasites can survive for some time in the blood of healthy carriers, and made the crossing from Africa to America many times inside slaves. Microbes could not take hold in the New World until it found a mosquito to transmit it to person to person. By 1650, malaria was endemic in the Caribbean and from there spread to parts of the Americas. The Parasite was only eliminated from the US in the early 20th century, and remains a threat in several part of South America today. By the mid -1600s, yellow fever was spreading in the New World. This virus may just cause a relatively mild flu like illness. The various names given to the deadly to the deadly disease portray the symptoms: Yellow fever refers to the jaundice which accompanies liver failure, and the Spanish name vomito negro, means black vomit caused by internal bleeding. Yellow Jack, coined