Microbes In The Americas Essay

By the time contact between the old and New worlds was reestablished in the late fifteenth century there were around 100 million Native Americans, some living in scattered communities, but with two great flourishing civilizations. The Incas in Peru and the Aztecs in central Mexico, each containing some 25-30 million people, Despite the fact that both these populations far exceeded the size and density needed to sustain the acute infectious diseases. So descendants of the hunter-gatherers who crossed from Siberia were familiar with the ancient persistent microbes we all inherited from our ape-like ancestors. The reason for the absence of crowd disease microbes in the Americas is probably quite straightforward; in the Old World these microbes
Soon after smallpox struck the Aztec capital, many people began to die, they died in the thousands. The disease covered several people all of the people could not walk or do anything but lay in their beds and slowly fade away. When Cortes returned to besiege Tenochtitlan in 1521 he added starvation to the devastation wreaked by the small pox and the city fell in just seventy-five days. An epidemic the was probably also smallpox similarly favored francisco Pizarro and his troops when they invaded the Inca Empire in 1532. About ⅓ of the empire's population was killed by smallpox. The disease killed many high ranking officials in the empire's, then the king, and his heir as well as other high ranking officials. There are many reasons why these and other Spanish victories over Native Americans were inevitable, not least because most had never seen white men before. In the case of the Aztecs, the interpreted Cortes's Arrival as the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy. The Native American's fate was sealed by smallpox, the demoralizing, disorientating, numbing effect of a sudden outbreak of this disfiguring disease that appeared. In the 1800’s when africans were still being used as slaves, they introduced malaria among other diseases