Columbus Day (Oct 14th) : What can you say? Less notable historically than he himself and much of modern written history has made him out to be, Columbus was just a third-string discover of the "New World" (after Herjólfsson/Eriksson and Zheng He) who should nevertheless be credited with what historians call the Columbian Exchange—the two-way transfers of diseases, plants, animals, and cultures that followed Columbus’s voyages. Diphtheria, measles, smallpox, and malaria traveled to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Syphilis found its way back to Europe (So you mean that Columbus was just fucking around ?!). And…oh yes…the disease, forced labor, invasion, and conquest imposed by the Europeans caused the deaths of millions of America’s indigenous peoples, in what surely must be considered one of the darkest tragedies of all time.
In those days, the Europeans, for the most part, had built up immunities to the diseases they brought with them. Some claim it was their longstanding close association in the typical household with pets and other domesticated animals which acted as the initial vectors of disease that enabled Europeans to develop more robust resistances over time. The native Americans, on the other hand, essentially had no pets or domesticated animals in their living quarters. As such, they lived *more cleanly*, but stood openly susceptible to such species-hopping infections when the germ-ridden yet mostly impervious foul-hardened Europeans arrived.
Well, well, well...what goes around...may now have come back:
The new findings, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, add to a growing collection of evidence for the "hygiene hypothesis." This theory suggests that
—Denise Grady, "Environment Rich in Germs May Reduce Risk of Asthma," The New York Times, September
...so the theory goes, the more germ-free an environment is, the fewer antibodies a kid's immune system will create. This not only leads to an overall weakness in the immune system, but it also means the immune responses will often be downright strange, such as skirmishing with normally harmless substances like cat dander, pollen, and peanuts.
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