How Human Lifestyle Allows For Disease To Kill Millions

 

The earliest humans lived as hunter-gatherers who moved from land to land finding plants, water and animals to hunt. They never stayed in the same position for a long time because they needed to continuously try to find new resources. The groups of people were not very populated. These aspects of hunter-gatherers gave them inherent protection from diseases. Some disease are transmitted from person to person with direct contact. This type of transmission is easiest when there is a large group of people who are close to each other. By being on the move, hunter-gatherers avoided this with their limited population and constant movement. Another advantage they had was that they are not reliant on one resource. Due to their inability to store food for long periods of time, hunter-gatherers cannot stay in one place and must move from food source to food source. This means that if they come across food that is carrying a disease, they can leave it and move on to the next food source. When people started to make civilizations, they couldn’t get up and move to the next source of food, they had to hope that they had enough non-diseased food. Parasites and other pathogens can enter the human body vie the fecal-oral route. When someone is invaded by a parasite, it is common for the parasite to release offspring into the feces of the human host. If the infected individual defecates in a place that is near food, the pathogen can get on the food and infect the next person who eats that food. Not being able to store food, once again, gives hunter-gatherers a strong defense against these kind of pathogens because they are not likely to expose their food to their feces (Powerpoint). Unfortunately, the advent of civilizations allowed diseases to run rampant through the vast human population.

The consequences of living in a civilization is exemplified by the Plague of Antonine that lasted from 165-180 CE.  During this fifteen year plague, millions of people died. The cause of this plague, we now know, was smallpox. A healthy person can be infected when an infected person, identified by the symptomatic sores, coughs or sneezes onto the healthy person (CDC). Restraining the transmission of this disease is hard when most people live in close proximity to each other. The plague of Justinian killed millions of Romans (Powerpoint). Another plague, called the Plague of Justinian also killed countless amounts of people. This plague occurred at the hands of Yersinia pestis, a bacteria that survives in rodents and their fleas (CDC). Fleas infected with the bacteria can bite a human and transmit the pathogen. The human lifestyle made this possible due to the pests that are attracted to civilizations. Farming and storing food creates a target for other small animals that search for food (Powerpoint). It was only a matter of time before a rodent searching for food would bring the plague. It is sad to think that so many people died in such an unfortunate way, however, we now understand disease and are capable of preventing another serious plague from killing millions more.

 

Resources:

The Price of Being Sedentary Powerpoint

CDC Website for Smallpox and Yersinia pestis