European exploration and disease

[defanatic]

I was thinking about the Spanish landing in the Americas, and how one of the things they caused was disease that the natives' immune systems couldn't fight.

Didn't the natives have any diseases that the europeans' immune systems couldn't fight, or am I missing something basic?

[Reaper52]

Yes they did. However, the Europeans had many more diseases than the natives. The natives had one or two domesticated animals. The Europeans had many more. On top of the, the plague eliminated many who were not resistant to disease, leaving a bunch of resistant people and their children behind. The Europeans simply had better more developed immune systems due to the plague and the horrible conditions they lived in.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I was thinking about the Spanish landing in the Americas, and how one of the things they caused was disease that the natives' immune systems couldn't fight.

Didn't the natives have any diseases that the europeans' immune systems couldn't fight, or am I missing something basic?

Not really. IIRC The native americans did not live in a population density or have the same level of animal domestication that would lead to things like new and novel diseases. The europeans did. Constant exposure to farm animals and species jumping, high population densities in some areas. All of those serve as an evolutionary crucible for pathogens.

I think there may have been a few different strains of influenza...

[Guardsman Bass]

There's some evidence that Syphilis may have been a New World disease that was carried back to Europe.

[Alyrium Denryle]

There's some evidence that Syphilis may have been a New World disease that was carried back to Europe.

Yeah, but it is a slow moving disease that no one has an immune system particularly capable of resisting. Not quite the same as the question posed in the OP.

Just throwing out a guess, but most diseases have to overcome a few more layers of defense than an STD does, which basically gets inserted right into the nice relatively unprotected tissues in your reproductive tract.

[Akkleptos]

The thing seems to be that most Europeans had some sort of resistance to Old-World viruses and strains thereof, to which the Americans had next to no resistance, for whatever reasons, the most likely, the lack of contact with humans from the Old World for thousands of years, which would extend to many non-human-transmitted diseases, due to the lack of significant livestock outside what would become the Viceroydom of Peru (whatwith all the Llamas, Alpacas and Vicuñas).

All that the people in Mesoamerica (by Kirchoff's definition) in lieu of cattle was pretty much the Xoloizcuintle (edible dogs).

Of course, this state of affairs in Mesoamerica made it a fertile ground for cannibalistic practices, but that's a matter for some more in-depth analyses.

EDIT: Prepositions and a bit of spacing (and some Wiki info on Kirchoff).

[Axiomatic]

Incidentially, this is also the reason North America fell so quickly, while Africa took so long - the Africans were resistant to European disease, and had plenty Europeans weren't good at surviving.