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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction
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To: Brumar89 who wrote (38116)7/19/2005 8:53:50 PM
From: DavesM  Read Replies (1) of 90947
 
The funny thing about small pox, the only way one develops an immunity to it, is thru exposure. Just because your parents or grand parents had survived the disease and developed an immunity, does not make you immune. This means that the young in Colonial North America were probably just as vulnerable to small pox as Indians (which would probably discourage the military or traders from deliberately spreading the disease, since they often brought their families to their posts).

Of course, by the 18th Century, physicians knew how to vaccinate people from small pox (but it was often unpopular because of a relatively high fatality rate, used a live virus, and was highly contagious - which tended to make one very unpopular with the neighbors) and was part of the reason troops were so miserable at Valley Forge (Early in the Revolutionary War, American troops suffered horribly from Small Pox - and there really is documentation that the British sought to spread the disease thru the American ranks).
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