Well, speaking of diseases, the Indians pretty certainly gave Columbus’s crew syphilis in return. Because it appeared in Europe for the first time just about then.
And it was about 500 years before docs developed antibiotics to get rid of the stuff......pretty good pay back.
Maybe. There are some indications on skeletons from 12th Century Britain and Ancient Rome of bone damage consistent with syphilis. One theory is that what was called "leprosy" back in the day was actually syphilis. Another theory is that there were two forms of the disease--a bad but hard to catch one in Europe and an easy to catch but not particularly bad one in the Americas. Originally there had been one back in Bering land bridge days, but they'd diverged, then reunited after European contact. One of the backing arguments for this is that little evidence of tertiary syphilis has been found in pre-Columbian American skeletons.