Why did the Native Americans get sick..?

Question

while the Europeans apparantly didn't? How could deadly viruses (including but not limited to smallpox) fester in the old world while apparantly no serious diseases were present in the new world when the Europeans arrived?

Most of you don't understand what the question was. The question was why did the natives get sick while the Europeans generally didn't, and not why did the natives get sick... answer acordingly

Answer 1

I think your greatly mistaken The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the basic hygiene practiced by the region's inhabitants. Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest. The Pilgrims smelled bad to the Indians. Squanto "tried, without success, to teach them to bathe," according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.
For all these reasons, the inhabitants of North and South America (like Australian aborigines and the peoples of the far-flung Pacific islands) were "a remarkably healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically, their very health proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes that Europeans and Africans would bring to them.
In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. For decades, British and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast. After filling their hulls with cod, they would go ashore to lay in firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. It is likely that these fishermen transmitted some illness to the people they met. The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by comparison. Some historians think the disease was the bubonic plague; others suggest that it was viral hepatitis, smallpox, chicken pox, or influenza.
Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scarce left alive," wrote Robert Cushman, a British eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned their villages and fled, often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the infestation with them, Indians died who had never encountered a white person. Howard Simpson describes what the Pilgrims saw: "Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them."
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. European Americans also contracted smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but they usually recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." In 1634 he wrote to a friend in England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection ', God the Original Real Estate Agent!
Many Indians likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them. Robert Cushman reported that "those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." After a smallpox epidemic the Cherokee "despaired so much that they lost confidence in their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe." 25 After all, neither Indians nor Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers could supply no cure; their medicines and herbs offered no relief. Their religion provided no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol, converted to Christianity, or simply killed themselves.
These epidemics probably constituted the most important geopolitical event of the early seventeenth century. Their net result was that the British, for their first fifty years in New England, would face no real Indian challenge.

Answer 2

Europeans had already been through many cycles of smallpox, where they did indeed die in large numbers. The survivors of smallpox in Europe ended up being the ones with immunity. Native Americans had not been exposed before, so they had not had a chance to develop immunity. They had their own diseases, but apparently none of them were deadly enough to kill significant numbers of Europeans.

Answer 3

Its all about exposure. Once the white man showed up, his diseases came with him.
This question shouldn't be that hard to figure out. Take a gander at schools. Once, someone shows up with some flu or whatever, they exposed everybody there and soon many children are gone from school because they got whatever the sick person brought with them.
That is how the flu spreads. If you are not in an area or exposed to an environmental virus, you don't get sick.

Answer 4

There were no natural immunities to diseases that native Americans had never been exposed to before. Syphilis made the trip back to Europe and ravaged the continent because Europeans had no immunity to it. You don't hear much about that because the Europeans wrote the history.

Answer 5

the virus that caused the disease just wasnt present in North America until the europeans came. if the thing that causes the disease isnt there, you arent going to have the disease

they all died once the virus came because europeans are more resistant to those diseases through both genetics via evolution and natural immunity built up from being exposed to the virus previously

Answer 6

Because the white man had built up immunity to viruses, etc over time but the Native Americans had never been exposed to anything of the sort and had no immunity whatsoever.

Answer 7

These diseases were common in europe and people were more immune to them- they were brand new diseases for the native americans whose bodies had never had to fight this sort of thing off before.

Answer 8

I think the Native Americans got sick because of many people coming from all over the world. 4 ex:France,Spainish,England,Africans and many more people envading their land. I'm a native American and that wasn't fair. I'm also black and we had no right to be slaves. That's a whole nother subject.

Answer 9

They had immunities that passed down in their families, that lessened the effect of the illnesses.

As for the other part, there was a concentrated mass of Europeans in Europe, whereas in America, there was less density = less disease.

Answer 10

Ditto to Name Underlined. Also the European lifestyle was far different from the Native American lifestyle, and much more condusive to disease and illness being spread (cities, sewage, garbage, travel/contact with other cities)