Aboriginal New World epidemiology and medical care, and the impact of Old World disease imports

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8320000
AutoresMarshall T Newman (University of Washington, autor correspondente)
Ano1976
Volume45
Fascículo3
Páginas667-672
Data de publicação1976-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0002-9483 • E-ISSN: 1096-8644
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/ajpa.1330450333
PMID793420
OpenAlexW2082950579
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas20
Referências citadas16

Various workers, including T. D. Stewart, claim that the aboriginal Americas were relatively disease‐free because of the Bering Strait cold‐screen, eliminating many pathogens, and the paucity of zoonotic infections because of few domestic animals. Evidence of varying validity suggests that precontact Americans had their own strains of treponemic infections, bacillary and amoebic dysenteries, influenza and viral pneumonia and other respiratory diseases, salmonellosis and perhaps other food poisoning, various arthritides, some endoparasites such as the ascarids, and several geographically circumscribed diseases such as the rickettsial verruca (Carrion's disease) and New World leishmaniasis and trypanosomiasis. Questionably aboriginal are tuberculosis and typhus. Accordingly, virtually all the “crowd‐type” ecopathogenic diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, malaria, measles, pertussis, polio, etc., appear to have been absent from the New World, and were only brought in by White conquerors and their Black slaves. My hypothesis is that native American medical care systems—especially in the more culturally advanced areas—were sufficiently sophisticated to deal with native disease entities with reasonable competence. But native medical systems could not cope with the “crowd‐type” disease imports that struck Indian and Eskimos as “virgin field” populations. Reanalysis of native population losses through a genocidal combination of disease, war, slavery and attendant cultural disruption by Dobyns, Cook and others strongly suggest that traditional estimates underplayed the death toll by a factor of the general order of ten. This would make for an immediately pre‐contact Indian population of some 90–111 million instead of the traditional 8–11 million. Evidence is growing that Indians may have been no more susceptible to new pathogens than are other “virgin soil” populations, and thus their immune systems need not be considered less effective than those in other people. Present‐day high mortality rates in Indians of both continents from infectious disease imports may be more socioeconomic than anything else

Disease · Environmental health · Ethnology · Infectious disease (medical specialty) · Malaria · Measles · Pathology · Population · Smallpox · Typhus · Vaccination · History · Immunology · Medicine · Virology · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research · Zoonotic diseases and public health