How did smallpox and tuberculosis effect prehistoric people?
I need to know about how they got it, how it effected the population and how it spread to other countries
Infectious Diseases - 2 Answers
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1 :
We don't know for sure what effect these diseases had, but these diseases probably killed people most of the time. Some people must have acquired enough immunity to the diseases to survive or humans would have disappeared from Europe. Small pox and TB transmission require very close contact with other infected people. Consequently, people in large groups are more likely to come into contact with infected people than people that live in small groups. This type of disease tends to cause boom or bust cycles of epidemics, where epidemics break out when population density becomes high, and the disease becomes very rare after the population is reduced by the disease. You would need to know the social structure of prehistoric populations and their migratory behavior to know how things spread from one group to another, or to other countries. Its obvious from written history that prehistoric people spread the disease within the Eastern Hemisphere, but not to the Western Hemisphere, since these diseases quickly wiped out many native people in North, Central, and South America after Europeans began arriving in the 1400's
2 :
Where and when TB first became present in unknown! In humans but appears to of been present for several thousands of years, Ancient Hindu texts 3,oooBP called this Ragarajthe king of disease and Rajayakshma the disease of kings. This emphasize that this disease is a killer of many the second name stressed this strikes indiscriminately and effects kings as well as ordinary people. In 1881 a doctor Robert Kouch found the organism that causes TB. Some believed the cattle spread this disease, and humans got this by eating the flesh and drinking the milk from these cattle.This was 7000 years ago. Where smallpox came from is unknown as well.Some believe it originated in Africa.Then spread to India and China thousands of years ago. The first recorded smallpox epidemic was in 1350 BC during Egyptian -Hittite War. It then went to Europe by 5th -7th centuries, then was present in North Amercia by 18th century At one time this disease wasin all countrys except Austrila. India had a breakout of smallpox around the 400AD mark, in Europe more around the 581 AD by 1000 AD doctors were getting to know what was causing all this.This was a painful suffering and dying disease.They started to treat people in India. The doctors would take pus from a sore of a person who was infected and rub this pus into a persons arm with a sore or cut so this would enter there system as well. In China the doctors would blow powered smallpox scabes up a persons nose to infect them at least that's what they thought would happen But to all of this treatments and studies IT Worked as a vaccine This all became common use in China,India and Islamic world, but Europe still had no clue for a vaccine.In the 1500s People from Europe were going to Africa and back well one person decided they needed a slave so brough one back from Africa, This man had smallpox.People got sick and died this got real bad nearly all humans were either sick or dying or dead from this smallpox in South and North Amercia In the 1700s people in England got news of the vaccine methord and started to do as well In 1997 the last case was in Somalia. (East Africa
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