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The most common type of smallpox, ordinary, historically has devastated populations with a 30% death rate. The smallpox virus is transmittable through bodily fluids and materials contaminated with infected materials. Generally, face-to-face contact is required for an individual to contract smallpox as a result of an interaction with another human.
A British sailor disembarking HMS Seahorse brought smallpox to Boston. 5759 people were infected and 844 died. 1736: Pennsylvania: 1738: South Carolina: 1770s: West Coast of North America: 1770s Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic At least 30% (tens of thousands) of the Northwestern Native Americans die from smallpox. [39] [40] 1781–1783 ...
The epidemic was probably spread to the Cherokee by white traders in the summer of 1739. The virus may also have come from Spanish Florida. 900 Cherokees had joined the British to fight the Spanish in Florida in 1739, and may have brought smallpox back with them. Cherokee "religious physicians" blamed the plague on "adulterous intercourse ...
The 1520s smallpox epidemic spread from Mesoamerica into adjacent maize-growing regions in North America.A population decline in the Columbia Basin, evidenced archaeologically by a sharp regional decline in artifacts and structures in the early 1500s, has been tentatively linked to a spread of this outbreak, but greatly predates any written record in the region.
[14] [5] The procedure Timoni called inoculation involved drying pus from a smallpox patient and rubbing or scraping it into a healthy person's skin, giving them a mild case of pox that conferred lifetime immunity. [15] Mather wanted to prove variolation was a relatively safe and effective procedure to protect people against smallpox.
During the 1770s, smallpox killed at least 30% (tens of thousands) of the Northwestern Native Americans. [74] [75] The smallpox epidemic of 1780–1782 brought devastation and drastic depopulation among the Plains Indians. [76] By 1832, the federal government of the United States established a smallpox vaccination program for Native Americans. [77]
Smallpox proved particularly deadly in the interior parts of North America such as on the Great Plains because these populations were among the last to experience steady contact with European settlers, such that few if any people in these communities had been previously exposed to European pathogens and developed natural immunity to them.
Smallpox is among the most notable of diseases in the Columbian Exchange due to the high number of deaths and impact on life for Indigenous societies. [1] [5] Smallpox first broke out in the Americas on the island of Hispaniola in 1518. [7] The disease was carried over from Europe, where it had been endemic for over seven hundred years. [5]