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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (156847)	1/23/2005 3:16:12 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi neolib; Re smallpox variations from Europeans being more dangerous. Here's what Stanford says: An important subsidiary mystery about smallpox concerns the birth of two new strains of the virus, closely related to the original smallpox agent but with noticeably different characteristics. Sometime during the late nineteenth century, a milder form of the disease, sometimes referred to as amaas or alastrim, was identified in Southern Africa and the West Indies: it generally caused less severe pockmarking, and was fatal in only about 1 percent of cases. Subsequent laboratory analysis confirmed that this new agent, eventually designated Variola minor, was genetically distinct from, although quite similar to, the original breed, which then became known as Variola major. Infection with either strain resulted in cross-immunity: anyone who survived a bout with one could not be infected by the other. As Variola minor spread through Brazil, England, and especially North America, it tended to displace its more vicious cousin, and local fatality rates declined precipitously. To compound the oddity, a third, intermediate strain was uncovered in East and West Africa in 1963: Variola intermedius killed about 12 percent of its victims.11 To this day, no one knows where, when, or how these less noxious smallpox relatives crept into existence. ucpress.edu If the variola minor had already been endemic to Africa, then they should have been immune to variola major. The above article sort of suggests that variola minor didn't appear until modern times, so this is consistent with a belief that the Bushmen were decimated by the same sort of smallpox that the Europeans and everyone else was hit by. But it is also consistent with variola minor perhaps being present in Africa from an early day, and then out competed by variola major when it was reimported during colonial times. This is somewhat inconsistent with the more modern observation that variola minor spreads better than variola major. However, it is a fact that changes in a culture can change the competition between cross-immune diseases. The tendency is for an increase in sanitation to reduce the severity of diseases. The reason for this is that the reduced severity, while less effective in any given situation, leaves its victims capable of wandering around and spreading the disease better. In situations of bad sanitation, highly virulent diseases can be spread even from dead people. In Europe, the disease was sufficiently universal that 90% of the victims were children. Servants with pock-marked faces were preferred over those smooth faced because it was known that survivors of the disease were unable to spread it. -- Carl P.S. By the way, there is an all too universal human tendency to blame diseases on foreigners (i.e. "The Italian Disease", etc.) What worries me about the liberals is their tendency to blame everything on their own people. The odd corollary to this tendency to self blame is a tendency to replace competition in education with an attempt at universal high self-esteem. Hey, if you want to increase the self-esteem of a population why the hell are you teaching them to blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in the world?