WI: Columbus Failed?

Won't have a communicable disease? During this period? Are you serious?



Yet another gross conceptual error. It doesn't need to be smallpox or anything you perceive to be nasty. It could be something Europeans considered to be a childhood disease like the measles or the mumps. It could be the flu. It can be nearly anything because it's a virgin field.



All typhoid fever requires for transmission is infected feces and guess what is one of the last things your body does as it turns into a corpse? Typhoid killed over 5000 people in Jamestown in less than two decades during the start of the 17th Century and we can only guess what it did to the surrounding tribes.

Need another candidate? How about typhus? All that needs are lice and they're really hard to eradicate. It also "loves" crowded conditions like those in jails or ships. And guess where our earliest verified account of typhus occurred? During a Reconquista siege of a castle in Spain in 1489.

As they say, THIS.

Particularly the underlined parts.

Even if the sailors are perfectly healthy by European standards (as in, wouldn't infect any other Europeans), the normal bacteria floating around their bodies, their stuff, and their systems will be problematic.

The question is not if something would spread, but what would spread.
 
Won't have a communicable disease? During this period? Are you serious?
Not everyone was sick all the time, not even sailors stuck on a boat together. There were contacts that did not communicate diseases. It's not inpossible in the small sample size in question for it to be one of those times and unlikely things happen all the time.

Now natural human bacteria, care to elaborate on that Elfwine?
 
You're overstating your case.


Not for the 16th Century.

Most people aren't carriers of anything and virulence of diseases vary.

Not today they aren't.

Shaking hands with a leper will not automatically pass leprosy.

Leprosy? Good god. We're not talking about leprosy.

Getting HIV from one time unprotected sex with an HIV patient is very low (things they don't tell you in school.)

We're talking about the 1500s, not the 20th Century. We're talking about health and medical practices in the 1500s and not the 20th Century.

It's possible one visit could cause an epidemic, but it probably wouldn't.

One visit caused epidemics in the OTL.

Show me an epidemiologist who says otherwise.

How about Donald R. Hopkins?
 
Not everyone was sick all the time, not even sailors stuck on a boat together.


What you consider "sick" in the 21st Century is not what someone in the 1500s considered "sick". They routinely lived with debilitating conditions that would have you tucked into a hospital.

There were contacts that did not communicate diseases.

And there were single and/or fleeting contacts which did.

You're saying it doesn't have to happen every time. That's true. I'm pointing out that it did happen often enough in the OTL and that it only has to happen once.

Now natural human bacteria, care to elaborate on that Elfwine?

Ever hear of staphylococcus?
 
Don Lardo beat me to it. What I had in mind by normal bacteria is pretty much this part: " What you consider "sick" in the 21st Century is not what someone in the 1500s considered "sick". They routinely lived with debilitating conditions that would have you tucked into a hospital". Ye Olde Days were germ-riddled to a level we would regard as unbelievably unsanitary even without any obvious piles of feces and similar.

Though, staphylococcus would do nicely too.
 
What you consider "sick" in the 21st Century is not what someone in the 1500s considered "sick". They routinely lived with debilitating conditions that would have you tucked into a hospital.

And there were single and/or fleeting contacts which did.

You're saying it doesn't have to happen every time. That's true. I'm pointing out that it did happen often enough in the OTL and that it only has to happen once.

Ever hear of staphylococcus?
None of which precludes the initial PoD in which a small number of sailors surviving and the native population not being destroyed because this time, they got lucky.

To Elf: On the Bacteria point, aha, that's not what I was thinking of. I was thinking of beneficial bacteria.
 
Ye Olde Days were germ-riddled to a level we would regard as unbelievably unsanitary even without any obvious piles of feces and similar.


And Ye Olde Days weren't too far in the past either. Have you seen those pictures of Civil War amputees from decades after the war? There were guys living for decades with fucking bones sticking out of their stumps or pieces of dead bone slowly working their way out of their bodies.

Check out the US Army Medical Museum some time but don't go right after lunch. :(

Though, staphylococcus would do nicely too.

Staph is just one example. There have been virgin field gum disease epidemics which killed people.
 
None of which precludes the initial PoD in which a small number of sailors surviving and the native population not being destroyed because this time, they got lucky.


Okay, so the locals get lucky and anyone of over a two dozen European disease which caused epidemics don't make it ashore.

Sadly, the sailors aren't equally lucky because they're stuck in Florida until they die or, most likely, are killed. The few goods they're able to salvage are going to make them targets. Hell, even the clothes on their backs are going to make them targets.

The OP's foolishness about the survivors setting themselves up like a bunch of "Admirable Crichtons" and passing on the benefits of "civilization" to the benighted Tequestas is both a non-starter and betrays a remarkable amount of historically anachronistic thinking about the time and it's peoples.
 
No-one has mentioned Measles yet.


I did, twice as a matter of fact.

However, because Tallwingedgoat had those as a child and recovered easily in the late 20th Century, they simply cannot be a threat to Amerinds in the 16th Century no matter what they did to the Inca among others in the OTL. :rolleyes:

Seriously, given the number of times this topic is discussed on these boards, I find some of the posts here absolutely mystifying.
 

Cook

Banned
Strange, I read that section and the Mumps and Flu registered, but Measles didn’t. Must be the Alzheimer’s kicking in…


No-one’s mentioned Measles yet.
:p
 

Lusitania

Donor
Why are we only discussing these massive contagious diseases. Today it is the everyday flu which kills the most people in the Western world. So all that was required for a village to be destroyed and their neighbour and so forth is for some snotty Old World sailor to sneeze or cough on the natives and BOOM.

It happened before and can happen again. Another thing is clothing or bedding (blankets) smallpox and other virus can live in them for quite along time. Allowing for the material to be transprted across the Atlantic.
 
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