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To: Varda

No, I don’t think that’s been “proven” at all.

Smallpox, measles, influenza, malaria, cholera, typhoid and even corona and rhinovirus all took their toll.

Now I have read that SOME are proposing the plagues in early New Spain (Central Mexico today) were hemorrhagic fevers but that was a localized event only and did not spread north or south, and certainly NOT to the lands that would become the USA and Canada, or South America and the Caribbean.


41 posted on 03/29/2021 8:27:17 AM PDT by Alas Babylon! ("You, the American people, are my only special interest." --President Donald J. Trump)
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To: Alas Babylon!
Not to the extent that native diseases did.
When half of the population died: the epidemic of hemorrhagic fevers of 1576 in Mexico
"During the 16th century, Mexico suffered a demographic catastrophe with few parallels in world's history. In 1519, the year of the arrival of the Spaniards, the population in Mexico was estimated to be between 15 and 30 million inhabitants. Eighty-one years later, in 1600, only two million remained. Epidemics (smallpox, measles, mumps), together with war, and famine have been considered to be the main causes of this enormous population loss. However, re-evaluation of historical data suggests that approximately 60-70% of the death toll was caused by a series of epidemics of hemorrhagic fevers of unknown origin."https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15500972/

Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico
"Recent epidemiologic research suggests that the events in 1545 and 1576, associated with a high death rate and referred to as cocoliztli (Nahuatl for "pest"), may have been due to indigenous hemorrhagic fevers"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/4/01-0175_article

Recent in this context was about 20 years ago when they isolated the pathogen.

These were the most densely inhabited parts of the New World outside Peru. Once you get to the future US, Canada and other areas populations weren't large.

42 posted on 03/29/2021 8:47:38 AM PDT by Varda
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