The Impact of Smallpox on the New World Essay -- American America Hist

The Impact of Sm every(prenominal)pox on the new(a) WorldTransportation and migration has been all-important(a) to Homo sapiens since the time of the hunter-gatherer. Humans vex used the incompatible methods of transportation since this time for a number of reasons (i.e. survival in the human face of the hunter-gatherer, to spread religion, or in order to search for precious minerals and spices). What few of these human travelers failed to realize is that often diseases were migrating with them. This essay will look at the spread of the disease smallpox. In the following I hope to check the history of smallpox as well as why it devastated the New World.In order to understand the history of smallpox one starting time has to understand how diseases like it evolve. Much like former(a) species, diseases that survive in the long run argon the hemipterans that most effectively reproduce and are able to find suitable places to live. For a microbe to effectively reproduce, it must(p renominal) be defined mathematically as the number of new infected per each original patient. This number will largely depend on how long each victim is able to spread the virus to other victims (Diamond, 198).Besides reproduction, a microbe needs a suitable environs to survive. In most cases this environment is a large animal nation. With this reference of environment a microbe is able to survive by, ironically, not killing everyone off. If a population is small and dense, the microbe will spread to all the animals in the immediate area and, if lethal, kill the entire species off. This not precisely ends the existence of the animal in this immediate population, but the existence of the microbe since it has no carrier to leach itself to. Therefore, the ideal population for a insidious microbe is a population t... ...nt of the Western Hemisphere. Today, for example, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico all have substantial or predominantly black populations in pl ace of endemic Indians lost to smallpox. (Thomson, 122) This, in bend, lead to the triangle slave trade, which produced the largest level and tolerant spread practice of slavery ever seen. Many historians agree that these turn of events could not have happened without smallpox. This single microbe not only changed the population makeup of the New World, but forever changed the New World agriculture and economy.Sources1) Diamond, Jared, Ch. 11 Lethal gift of livestock, in Guns, Germs, and Steel W.W. Norton & Co, 1997, ISBN 0-393-03891-2, pp. 195-2142) Thomson, Mark. Junior course Winner The Migration of Smallpox and Its Indelible Footprint on Latin American History. The History Teacher. 1998.