Decades ago, my Latin American history teacher mentioned the boom-crash population cycle in Precolumbian America, and at that time overcrowding (which fits) was the best guess. Thanks C19fan.
Posted on 01/16/2018 6:08:19 AM PST by C19fan
In the decades after Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, one of the worst epidemics in human history swept through the new Spanish colony. A mysterious disease called “cocolitzli” appeared first in 1545 and then again in 1576, each time killing millions of the native population. “From morning to sunset,” wrote a Franciscan friar who witness the epidemic, “the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.”
In less than a century, the number of people living in Mexico fell from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. “It’s a massive population loss. Really, it’s impressive,” says Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, an epidemiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What can even kill so many people so quickly?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Donald Trump’s great, great, great, great, great grandfather was the cause. Both times.
Lack of government funding.
Why does the world blame Americans for genocide when it was clearly the Spaniards!
But Europeans are the cause of all bad things. Every time.
//sarcasm
Climate change.....................
So you might be a "shithole" country if your people eat or drink food or water contaminated with feces.
It is also "possible" that the existing culture and agricultural practices of the native peoples served to exacerbate the spread of the virus - assuming this particular virus is even the culprit.
It is bacterial, not viral.
It may be bacterial, but surely seems like it went viral.......
European colonization is always the implied causation but are there any accounts that would lend credence to the notion of Europeans being somehow immune or less affected by this than the native population(s)? Was salmonella not present in the Americas prior to Spanish colonization?
Oops! Thanks for the correction. After substituting “bacteria” for “virus”, I stand by the remainder of my post.
Absence of global warming.
You are correct. From wikipedia:
Factors outside the household, such as unclean food from street vendors and flooding, help distribute the disease from person to person.[11] Because of poverty and poor hygiene and insanitary conditions, the disease is more common in less-industrialized countries, principally owing to the problem of unsafe drinking water, inadequate sewage disposal, and flooding.[15] Occasionally causing epidemics, paratyphoid fever is found in large parts of Asia, Africa, Central and South America. Many of those infected get the disease in Asian countries. About 16 million cases occur a year, which result in about 25,000 deaths worldwide.[16]
Decades ago, my Latin American history teacher mentioned the boom-crash population cycle in Precolumbian America, and at that time overcrowding (which fits) was the best guess. Thanks C19fan.
The very definition of a “shithole”.
I’m surprised it wasn’t good old fashioned Cholera.
L
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
IOW, post #8 is spot-on.
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