On 8/18/02 2:12 PM, "Robert Harley" <harley@argote.ch> wrote:
>
> PS: Funny how the New World world population supposedly had no immunity
>   to Old World diseases and died like flies, but the Old World
>   population was completely unaffected by New World diseases (other
>   than tabacco and syphilis...)  Bullshit meter red-lining again...
You aren't the first person to ask this question, but over the last few
years there have been some good answers to this coming from the genetics
research folks.  As I understand it, there is a growing body of genetic
evidence that European immune systems are substantially tougher and more
resistant to a wider range of infectious diseases than those found in other
peoples around the world, including a surprisingly wide range of hereditary
immunities and partial immunities/resistance to common viruses and bacteria
found around the world.  As a result, when the first wholesale mixing of
people from different parts of the world started occurring on a regular
basis, the Europeans fared much better than most others.
The standard theory for this is that Europe was the first major region of
the planet to become densely populated and urbanized (to the extent that
they "urbanized" a thousand years ago).  Because of this, Europe was a
festering cauldron of disease without the benefit of modern sanitation and
medicine for a thousand plus years, much more so than the rest of the world
and suffered from repeated large-scale epidemics and plagues that took
severe tolls on the population.  Modern ethnic Europeans have genetics that
survived a unique and brutal culling process by a rather extensive range of
diseases over dozens of generations.
What the geneticists are discovering is that for a great many of the world's
most common infectious diseases, there is a percentage of the ethnically
European population that has hereditary immunity and an even larger segment
that has at least some hereditary resistance compared to people from other
parts of the world.  And for most ethnic Europeans it isn't just one
disease, they have varying levels of genetic resistance to a veritable
cornucopia of infectious diseases.  Because of similarities in the
mechanisms and characteristics of viruses and other pathogens around the
world to ones that Europeans were exposed to, the robust defenses their
genetics provided them against their native diseases frequently imparted
some resistance to diseases which they had never been exposed.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork