Throughout history and my artifacts it is seen how different diseases changed civilizations/societies and made me realize how devastating epidemics can be. An extremely good example of a disease changing a society forever was smallpox in regards to the Native Americans. As I discussed in Artifact 4-smallpox, smallpox was an extremely infectious disease that killed countless scores of individuals, including the Native Americans. The case with the Native Americans was a little different though because smallpox was brought to the Americas by the Europeans. Smallpox was not only brought over by the Europeans, the Europeans eventually realized that the Native Americans had no immunity to the disease, so they targeted the Native Americans with the first recorded use of chemical warfare. The Europeans took the blankets that smallpox victims had used and gave them to Native Americans as gifts effectively spreading smallpox to multiple Native American communities. In the aforementioned case the Native American’s society responded to the smallpox epidemic poorly because they did not have the science or medicine capable of curing smallpox, so they turned to their gods and tried to “appease” them. Of course curing smallpox was no small feat for the Europeans, individuals like Jenner contributed to the knowledge of how to cure it, but ultimately to eradicate it they had to isolate each individual who came in contact with it.

The epidemic diseases that we have discussed throughout the class have not only affected societies, but also societies have affected the epidemic diseases themselves. What I mean is that we have impacted the environment of which the diseases come from and in some cases essentially made them worse on civilizations. In my 2nd artifact I discussed the exact reasons how the changes in our society have made deadly diseases more transmissible and in general more deadly. I had stated that the “increase of globalization/industrialization has made diseases much more easily transmissible due to things like airplanes, public transportation, and major cities”. In my opinion, the emergence of major cities had the greatest role in increasing the virulence and deadliness of diseases because with the invention of the modern city came multiple different factors that amplified one another. Major cities made individuals live much closer together than they previously had to in rural areas increasing the transmission of diseases, they increased the pollution in the air causing individuals to have weakened immune systems, and they allowed for diseases to spread more rapidly among food and water supplies. Major cities is more of a modern day example, but there were impacts on the environment by humans in ancient times. One example of an impact that ancient humans had on the environment which accelerated the transmission of a disease was the creation of animal husbandry. Animal husbandry being the caring for and breeding of farm animals; this allowed diseases to gain a foothold in ancient civilizations because many diseases can be passed on from animals to humans.

Many people would question why should they worry about diseases now if medicine and technology has become so advanced since ancient times, which in itself is a good question, but the answer is simply that new diseases still arise and old diseases can mutate. We can find a cure for most diseases that do arise now, but our medicine and technology has it limits and some things we cannot figure out at the moment. In my last artifact, artifact 9-HIV/AIDS I discussed how HIV/AIDS is a relatively new disease that we do not have a cure for at this time. HIV/AIDS is a perfect example of how emerging diseases can affect our society today. In a way diseases that affect modern societies today can be even more frightening than one’s that affected ancient societies because in ancient societies they did not know what caused the diseases ,but in modern day societies we do know what causes the diseases and if we cannot figure out a cure people are extremely frightened that our superior medicine/technology cannot help.

Conversely, modern day societies go as far as to unwillingly  promote the emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases.  The main point that I would like to make in regards to modern day societies promoting the emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases is the ignorance of the severity of diseases in less fortunate poverty stricken countries. An example of ignorance of the severity of a disease just because it does not affect affluent countries is that of Ebola. Ebola ravages less fortunate countries in Africa and is a dreadful disease with horrible symptoms. Ebola was not a problem to people and the media in the US until one US citizen contracted the disease, then it was all over the news and everyone was talking about it. When a disease is ignored because it is in an area that affluent civilization’s citizens typically do not care about it allows the disease to spread without being noticed and decimate countries that are already ravaged by other problems. The spread of the disease can eventually reach more affluent countries, then it essentially is recognized by those countries, but if more affluent countries were to send over more aid as soon as an emerging disease was confirmed many lives could be saved.

Help Received: Previously completed artifacts