Epidemics and New World explorers
When we are thinking the cases like New World diseases, we must realize that the conquerors, what came from Europe were not very likely researchers the culture of Indians. Those people were motivated by gold, and that's why there happened always things, what those people wanted to keep away from the public. And when we are thinking about bacteria, people didn't the existence of the bacteria until the year 1640, when Antoni Philips van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) invented the microscope. Then the scientists of the 19th century connected bacteria to diseases(1).
Viruses wait for their finder to the end of the 19th century, and the first photographs of viruses, what were taken by using the electron microscope was taken in the 1930s. The electron microscope, what needed for that operation was invented by Ernst Ruska(2) and Max Knoll(3) in 1931. That means that before those incidents there were not even known, the existence of bacteria and viruses(4).
The secrecy causes always rumors and there is one thing, what has been forgotten, when we are talking about the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) is that this organization keeps in its hands the last of the smallpox viruses(5), and if those organisms would be terminated, there are still laboratories, where are those viruses, stored in liquid nitrogen. There are also stories that the New World infections did not cause diseases for Europeans. When we are looking at cases like "Jamestown" (6)the first stable British colony in North America and the tales of Spanish conquistadors, those people were infected like everybody else.
The pain in the stomach and diarrhea almost caused the end of the Jamestown colony, but the reason for those things could be caused by some diseases, what were coming from Europe. The Spanish Conquistadors faced boils and one example of the deadly surprise was the trip, which conquistador named Balboa (7) made in the place of the modern state of Panama. That man lost half of his staff in that journey across Central America isthmus. The reason could be the bites of the spiders and snakes, but the epidemics can also be the reason for that kind of mass death.
Also, syphilis is coming from America, but the thing is that there is a possibility that many conquistadores and British colonialists were claimed to die in battle against Indians, what seemed nicer in papers, than telling how those people died because they had diarrhea, and those people just died, because nothing couldn't stay inside them. But the thing is that in those days were not DNA or other genetic tests and the epidemic sources were not even able to track.
So the problem is that those conquerors care only about gold, and they didn't even care about the reason for the deaths of the people. Conquistadors didn't even ask about diseases or poisonous animals, and that thing caused many deaths. This is one of the things, what we must realize when we are looking at history.
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