Native American Diseases? Give me a history lesson :)
 

I know how Small Pox and other european diseases wrecked havoc on the Aztecs, Incas, and many others. I'm wondering though, Are there any diseases that europeans contracted from the Native Americans? I've never heard of anything they had but I always figured there was somethings that they had that europeans didn't at the time. Obviously it wasn't as devastating as Small Pox or I would have heard about it. What about Influenza in Native American history. Did they have it before, or did they contract it from the europeans?

I googled this with little luck. There's just so many irrelevent results to dig through. I found a few things but nothing I didn't already know.. I just haven't used the right search keywords I guess :)

Wikipedia did help with the small pox history but that just told me what I already knew.

I heard in an American History class that syphilis may have been a disease the Native Americans had to give the Europeans. There was speculation that the Lewis and Clark journey and people associated with it had deaths of unknown origin, with symptoms of what we know as syphilis.

King Henry VIII suffered from (and is theorized died from) syphilis in 1547- I'm sure there were others, but I specifically remembered him and looked it up. Lewis and Clark wasn't until 1804. :)

Maybe it was gonorrhea then? It was one of the ones that is curable by today's medicine.

Maybe it's just more anti-Muslim BS, but I recently heard that the Crusaders first brought syphills back to Europe when they returned from the Middle East.

All those things have been around for many, many years! Promiscuity is the cause, not a tribal society.

no one said anything about tribal society causing disease.

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What a strange thing to say about Montezuma.

So, when I got the trots from eatting in an Israeli establishment- I suppose that was Moses's revenge? Or better yet... Abraham?

If I get the trots in a Greek restaurant can I blame it on Alexander the Great?

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Pocon1..... do you like picon punches? They are quite delicious.

the reason that infection was all one way towards the native americans was because of conditions in europe at the time.

Due to their highly agrarian? argicultural? society, the stable food source allowed europeans to congregate into large cities and live at a high density. Combine that with unsanitary conditions (dirty drinking water, fecal matter in the streets, etc.) and you had the perfect conditions for disease to ferment and grow.

Europeans were just really dirty compared to the native americans who lived in small communities produced by subsistance hunting supplemented by gathering and a little argiculture in places.

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I read in a medicinal book somewhere it was gonorrhea that have roots in the middle-east specificly from camel's I guess its a camels disease (not smokes) and gonorrhea is not curable, the medicin just incapsels the disease. And gonorrhea will stay in you body forever just not breaking out.