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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Henry Volquardsen who wrote (66112)	8/12/1999 7:17:00 AM
From: George Acton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Infectious diseases were very important in the European conquest of the New World, but the diseases in question were viral -- mainly smallpox and measles, but also mumps, influenza and others. These are spread by aerosol from human to human, have a higher fatality rate if encountered in adulthood and do select for genes in the immune system. I've seen an estimate that the mortality rate in the Americas was on the order of 90% in the first period of contact with Europeans. Bubonic plague probably wasn't significant. In the early stages of an epidemic, it's carried by rats and their fleas, so it's a disease of cities and settled countryside with a high enough population density to support a big rat population, conditions that didn't prevail over much of the Americas. Transport is another issue. Rats die of plague, so the long transatlantic passage would have provided a sort of quarantine. But smallpox and measles viruses can remain infectious in dried secretions on objects of human use such as blankets. --George Acton