What is the worst disease linked to urbanization?
There is a particularly bad one called Chagas’ disease, which is still around today, mostly in South America. It’s caused by a single-celled protozoan that can get in and disrupt the nerves of the intestinal tract so that a person stops eliminating. We see mummies with masses the size of soccer balls in their guts, which would have ruptured, releasing a massive amount of bacteria into the system. It takes weeks, and it’s a horrible way to go. We didn’t have that parasite until we started building adobe houses, which that little bug loves. So we created our own monsters when we decided to live more closely together? There’s more to the story the other historical milestone. Probably the main way new diseases appear has been through the domestication of animals. That allowed host jumping, in which a bug that infects some kind of animal switches over to us. I think there are only five or six parasites that we can say with certainty were parasites of humans before Homo sapiens emerged as a
