Diseases of Indians on Virgin Soil. There Term Paper

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diseases of Indians on virgin soil. There is one reference used for this paper.

Over the course of time, the aborigine populations have declined due to disease. It is important to look at factors which may have contributed to this declines, as well as possible rebounds in the populations.

New Arrivals

Many historians believe that the arrival of Europeans and the Spanish resulted in Indian populations being exposed to a number of diseases which had previously wrecked havoc overseas.

Virgin Soil Epidemics

There is "no doubt that chronic disease was an important factor in the precipitous decline and it is highly probable that the greatest killer was epidemic diseases, especially as manifested in virgin soil epidemics. Virgin soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless.

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The importance of virgin soil epidemics in American history is strongly indicted by evidence that a member of dangerous maladies -- smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more -- were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World (Crosby, 289)."

Mammoth Declines

As the newcomers made contact with the aborigines, the diseases they brought with them began to take their toll on the populations. In the early 1600's, Indian populations in New England declined by ninety percent due to bubonic or pneumonic plague. Smallpox was responsible for the deaths of more than fifty percent of the Huron, Iroquois, Cherokee and Catawbas nations, as well as two-thirds of the Omaha and four-fifths of the Indian population near the Columbia River.

Additional Effects

The pathology of the diseases was not the only….....

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