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Travel by people and the transportation of goods across regions of the world contributed to the spread of infectious diseases long before anyone had conceived of globalization. In fact, a great deal of human history has been written by disease. In the second century A.D., measles was spread between Rome and Asia along caravan routes. In the following century, these same trade routes were responsible for carrying smallpox, which wiped out as much as one-third of the population in affected areas.
| “Epidemics of cholera follow major routes of commerce. The disease always appears first at seaports when extending into islands or continents.”
- John Snow, “On the Mode of Communication of Cholera,” 1849. |
The next truly massive epidemic occurred in the 13th and 14th centuries, when Mongol horsemen carrying infected fleas brought bubonic plague from northern Burma to Eastern Europe, and then rats helped carry the disease throughout the rest of the continent. All of the travel and trade that were taking place in Europe made the continent a veritable petri dish for infectious disease.
After enduring wave after wave of epidemics, the disease-hardened descendants of these caravan traders, horsemen, and sailors brought about an unprecedented human catastrophe when they began traveling to the Americas after 1492. The indigenous population of North and South America, which had lived in comparative isolation, then became victim to perhaps the greatest mass loss of life in human history.
In the two hundred years following the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, historians estimate that the Native population of the Americas declined by 95 percent (from a total population of perhaps 100 million), mostly due to imported diseases. The new microbes brought by Europeans included smallpox, measles, typhus, diphtheria, chicken pox, and influenza.
Soon afterward, Europeans began the African slave trade into the Americas, bringing laborers to replace the many indigenous people who died. And with the trade ships and human cargo that crossed the Atlantic came new epidemics of diseases from Africa, including malaria, yellow fever, and dengue fever.
The opening of the Americas by Europeans beginning at the end of the 15th century created, for the first time in the world, a substantial economic linkage between Europe, North and South America, and Africa. Some health authorities have also referred to this as the “microbial unification of the world” (Berlinguer cited in Aginam).
* Picture of Strep: http://www.nrp.org.uk/cms_images/Strept1.gif
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