Monday, October 20, 2008
The plague
The plague kind of reminded me of the movie "The Happening". People just dying out of thin air. After while they were able to figure out where the plague came from. I think its amazing how pre agricultural populations were constantly in contact with chronic and parasitic diseases and actually have very low death rates due to these diseases. Without a host the parasite will die. It not until agricultural periods that we see infectious diseases come into the human populations. Partly because these populations were the first to pastoralize and come into contact with herds. So when the plague had made its impact, I belive the disease' had so many hosts that there was no need to not completley deprive the body. Its mentioned that there were less deaths when the plague came around again. It think it has to do with natural selection and how our bodies cause mutations to accomodate fighting the virus. Did you know that 10% of the European population is immune to HIV, due to the human leukocyte antigent (HLA)
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4 comments:
I was wondering how we know that the death rate was low in pre-agricultural societies. Such societies leave no written records. Even in the ancient and medieval world, figuring death rates is not much more than guesswork.
Did you have a source for that?
this is the girl from the library that noticed you writing your blog last week. :) I just watched that movie and it freaked me out. Disease does that to me... maybe because it makes me feel so helpless. So glad I didn't live back when the black plague was going on. I didn't know it was still around and that some people still die from it. Scary. Who knows what other diseases are lingering in our world. People really don't change, though. If something like that happened today they would be trying all kinds of weird remedies like they were back then.
I feel the same way Cori does. It is very terrifying to think this disease still exists today, especially with our progress in the medical and technology fields. It does make me feel comforted that we are equipped to handle something like this better than that of a pre-agricultural society. I agree that they would be trying all sorts of different things to eradicate the disease. I think the only difference is that it might be perhaps more pharmaceutically than with charms, spells, incense burning, and the ringing of bells.
Even without written records we are able to detect diseases by studying the skeletons such as syphillis and cribria orbitalia (a leasion in the eye socket associated with iron deficiency leads to anemia). Epidemics weren't a problem until agricultural societies because population size and density were small enough. Its bigger populations that we see higher death rates because of the reliance on crops, with crop disease and weather situations there were constant nutritional problems, malnutrition decreases the resistance to infectious diseases. As far as sources, I'd say my classes. I'm a Bio. Anthropology major, so disease in past populations are down my ally.
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