Spotty disease

Usage examples of measles.

Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus competed for top rank among the killers.

Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, by decimating many peoples on other continents.

Infectious diseases like smallpox, measles, and flu arose as specialized germs of humans, derived by mutations of very similar ancestral germs that had infected animals (Chapter 11).

Against other illnesses, though—including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox—our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity.

A classic illustration of how such diseases occur as epidemics is the history of measles on the isolated Atlantic islands called the Faeroes.

A severe epidemic of measles reached the Faeroes in 1781 and then died out, leaving the islands measles free until an infected carpenter arrived on a ship from Denmark in 1846.

Within three months, almost the whole Faeroes population (7,782 people) had gotten measles and then either died or recovered, leaving the measles virus to disappear once again until the next epidemic.

Studies show that measles is likely to die out in any human population numbering fewer than half a million people.

Only in larger populations can the disease shift from one local area to another, thereby persisting until enough babies have been born in the originally infected area that measles can return there.

What's true for measles in the Faeroes is true of our other familiar acute infectious diseases throughout the world.

In addition, measles and some of our other "childhood" diseases are more likely to kill infected adults than children, and all adults in the tribelet are susceptible.

For example, measles virus is most closely related to the virus causing rinderpest.

The close similarity of the measles virus to the rinderpest virus suggests that the latter transferred from cattle to humans and then evolved into the measles virus by changing its properties to adapt to us.

The principal recorded killers were smallpox, influenza, measles, typhoid, typhus, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and syphilis.

The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others.