Cocoliztli: Fever Death of Mexico

katchen

Banned
It sounds like the Spanish were very lucky that the coastal plains acted as a moat keeping the rodents with cocalitzi away from their ships and Spain. So was the rest of Europe.
 
I recall reading about this in Mann's 1491. He said it was spread by rats after sanitation in the Triple Alliance broke down due to measles and smallpox killing most of the populace.
 
Indeed and the droughts of the period made it so that the carriers converged on the places where food and water could only be found-human habitation. Even after the listed historical great outbreak several more minor outbreaks occurred it seems due to drought conditions for the remainder of the century.
 
Wow, that's pretty staggering if true.

EDIT: Most of the stuff on google seems to be in Spanish or dated to the early 2000s, how accepted is this theory?
 
If it is true, one wonders where this diseases is now. It's pretty hard to get rid of diseases which have a native reservoir like this. Hell, yersina pestis is now percolating in the American west.
 
EDIT: Most of the stuff on google seems to be in Spanish or dated to the early 2000s, how accepted is this theory?

IIRC it's not fully accepted. The fact that the Spanish were not infected but Indians were is pretty strong evidence (though not conclusive) that the disease was an infectious disease from Europe.

That said, it's an interesting idea. The trouble with medical history is that diseases that don't affect the bone leave no trace and so cannot be studied scientifically, but it also means that we as alternate history writers have a lot of leeway when writing about historical epidemics.
 

katchen

Banned
The symptoms described look a lot like the septicemic version of bubonic plague. The Black Death swept Europe in waves from 1348 pretty much through the 1400s and then stopped around 1500. But there would have been a reservoir of plague infected fleas on European black rats for a while past then. Maybe a few passed the fleas on to local rodent populations by the 1540s.
Which could explain how and why we have Bubonic Plague turning up endemic in gopher and prairie dog colonies all through the American Southwest by the time Anglos settle the area.
As for why Europeans wer enot affected, I think by the 16th century, repeated waves of plague may have a) left surviving Euroopeans with some degree of immunity to Yersina Pestis and/or b) Spanish Europeans may have had some idea that the plague came from rats and were careful to keep rats away from them. Don't forget that something like 1/5 to 1/4 of Spain was of Jewish descent and a lot of ideas of cleanliness did pas from Jews to Spaniards and keeping rats out of homes may have been one of them.
 
Yeah, it seems very odd that the Spanish would be virtually unaffected by an indigenous disease that was killing a massive 80% of the native population. I understand that the theory is that the poor conditions of the natives under Spanish rule caused susceptibility to the disease, but it seems kind of incredible that with the Spanish having close contact that they wouldn't have been at least partially affected as well.

And it sounds like the main evidence for it being an indigenous fever is contemporary descriptions of the sickness, which can be iffy or misinterpreted. I don't doubt the death numbers, just the disease in question.
 

katchen

Banned
This might be worth an email to the article's authors. If this is indigenous, why aren't Spanish affected.? And if it is not indigenous, how can something this virulent not affect the Spanish population to at least some degree? It sounds as though the Spanish had developed some kind of sanitation procedure that spared them.
 
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