How did the Introduction of European Diseases to the New World Devastate the Americas?

The introduction of European diseases to the New World was unintentional – starting with Christopher Columbus, the Europeans would set a trend for spreading their diseases to the New World. However, throughout the process, they did not realize that they were the ones spreading the diseases. This was because they had already developed immunity to the disease, and often by the time the disease had caught on and had its effects on the natives, the Europeans had already left. When they then came back, they saw that the people had died due to a disease. Because the natives did not have immunity to the diseases, while the Europeans did, the Europeans never even thought they would be spreading any diseases. Although the introduction of diseases in the Columbian Exchange was unintended, it had devastating effects on the civilizations which had thrived there and the people who lived in them. Although to the American natives the disease was a foe, to the Europeans it was an ally, helping them to defeat the newly weakened empires with ease.

There were many different diseases which were introduced from the Old world to the New, including smallpox, bubonic plague, cholera, common cold, diptheria, malaria, influenza, chickenpox, measles, typhoid, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhus and pertussis. However, not only the European people spread the disease. Other spreaders of the diseases were animals, seen as many of the diseases were zoonotic, such as smallpox, tuberculosis and measles. African slaves also brought the disease as well as simply the exchange of items. Anything the Europeans touched could be contaminated. To this day, it still remains unclear who transmitted what, and what spread. Many different Europeans arrived in a civilization at a time, and often each of them may have carried different diseases. Then, these diseases were transmitted from one person within the civilization to the next, as none of them knew how the disease was being transmitted and often symptoms only showed after the person had already caught the disease and spread it by a significant amount.

Arguably, smallpox was the most dangerous of all of the introduced diseases. This was the main killer which caused the decline of previously great civilizations like the Aztec and Inca. Although it was found in both North America and South America, South Americans did not spread the disease to North America – the Europeans brought it to the 2 continents separately. The Aztec civilization went from having 25 million-30 million citizens to having only around 3 million, largely due to the killer virus of smallpox.

Although the diseases had devastating on the native populations, they brought much help to the Europeans. Once Europeans had explored a place and spread the disease, they often had to return home. While they were gone, the disease would ravage the civilization, and by the time the conquerors returned, the civilization had been destabilized and had often been victim to internal wars. This allowed a small group of the conquerors to easily take over the once-mighty civilization through superior weaponry, trickery and the weak state of the opponent civilization. In some cases, the conquerors were the first people to bring the disease. In this case, the civilization was often much more easy to conquer as it had had no time to recover since the disease and had only a small amount of people who had to fight against soldiers with advanced technology and cruel methods.

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