Artifact 1: The Price of Being Sedentary
As humanity continues to move throughout the 21st century, diseases remain a factor that presents a distinct threat to human population. The Bubonic Plague, smallpox, the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, and the more recent Ebola outbreak in Africa demonstrate the continuing susceptibility of human populations to disease. In the long history of humanity, disease is a relatively new concept arising from two distinct changes in human populations: end of a migratory lifestyle and globalization. During contemporary times, new found challenges like lack of fresh water present issues for managing disease, but the advances in technology also provide humanity with more tools than ever to help combat disease.
While disease has always been a part of the human experience, one distinct change in human history made disease a regular challenge to humanity. The agricultural revolution, where human populations transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to permanent established farming ones. While this did allow the human population to explode and provided a steady supply of food, it also brought about many distinct health challenges that set conditions for infectious diseases to arise. First, the establishment of agriculture also reduced the diversity of a human’s diet, restricting them to usually a few staple crops and impacting their health (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary). The permanent nature of human populations now also meant that water sources were shared by both humans and their domesticated animals, allowing for animal borne diseases to be spread to humans far easier (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary). In addition, static human societies created waste that they never moved away from, attracting pests like mosquitoes and rats that serve as vectors for disease (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary). Most importantly, the agricultural revolution increases human population density to a point where human-human transmission of disease became a threat (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary). In hunter-gatherer societies human interaction was limited to people individuals who had the same experiences and generally genetic material as them. Now however, they could be exposed to whole new populations that carried disease their immune systems were not prepared to combat.
Human to human interaction and its impact on the spread of disease would come to plague humanity as it moved into its next great societal change thousands of years after the agricultural revolution. In classical antiquity as the Roman Empire reached its peak and began to facilitate trade with the East, human populations were introduced to diseases which they had no immunity for and suffered for it. Plagues in 153CE, 580CE, and 1380CE that devastated the urbanizing populations of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin are a testament to the impact globalization had on the spread of disease (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary). When Europeans first travelled to North and South America, they brought with them diseases like smallpox and yellow fever that nearly destroyed native populations (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary). In modern times, increased economic globalization has led to deforestation which has created new ecological niches for disease spreading vectors (BI-205X, The Price of Being Sedentary).
Contemporarily, human interaction and technological achievements have both positively and negatively impacted human health. Negatively, increasing human populations and forced migrations and displacements have created a crisis for freshwater in some areas, increasing the impact of water-associated diseases like cholera and diphtheria (McMichael AJ, 2013). On the other hand, human technological developments has allowed for new human understanding in the microbial world has allowed for vaccines to be developed against previously unknown infections like hepatitis B and HPV (Fauci et al. 2012).
Bibliography
BI-245X course slides. The Price of Being Sedentary.
Fauci AS, Morens DM. 2012. The Perpetual Challenge of Infectious Diseases. New England Journal of Medicine. 454-461.
McMichael AJ. 2013. Globalization, Climate Change, and Human Health. New England Journal of Medicine. 1335-1343.