When populations increase and come into contact with other population, they often encounter diseases for which they have no immunity - and the results can be devastating. There are many examples.
- In 430 BC when the Athenians encountered the Persians in the Peloponnesian Wars, they also encountered typhoid fever which killed a quarter of the population of Athens in the next four years.
- Around 165 AD, Roman soldiers returning from the Middle East brought smallpox to Italy - and five million people died from the disease.
- In the 530s, Justian’s Byzantine armies conquered North Africa. In 541, bubonic plague, probably brought by rats in wheat shipments from Egypt, broke out in Constantinople, killing possibly 80% of the city’s inhabitants. It spread throughout the known world, eventually reducing Europe’s population by 40%.
- Bubonic plague was again brought to Europe in 1348, probably by Italian traders returning from the Crimea. Between 20 and 30 million Europeans died.
- Diseases, such as smallpox and measles, brought by Europeans to South America in the 16th century, wiped out up to 90% of the native poulation.
- British traders and soldiers brought cholera from India to London in 1832 and spread it to the Americas by 1834.
- Spanish flu, spread by American troops during the First World War, killed between 50 and 100 million people. In Fiji, 14% of the population died in just two weeks.
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Malaria in Africa
