How is the stage set for a potential pandemic?
It was as if the Danish scientists in the 1890s studying East Greenlanders looked back through 10,000 years of human history, before the era infectious diseases — because most infectious diseases came through the domestication of mammals and birds. That kind of disease is a product of dense populations or urbanization or large-scale agricultural society. That’s what creates “disease transitions”? Yes. It seems that diseases have emerged in fairly abrupt fashion, in what historians of disease call disease transitions. When the Mongols created their wonderful Eurasian world empire and made commerce between the Yellow Sea and the Atlantic possible, they also created a pathway for diseases like the Black Death to reach Europe. Every major step in the biological unification of the human race brings a massacre of populations. The European arrival in the New World led to the deaths of 90 percent of the population there. Those were disease transitions. And there’s broad agreement amongst hist
