It seems there are many cases throughout history where a group of explorers makes first contact with some group of natives, and the natives get infected by diseases with which they had no previous contact or immunity. Europeans came to America and the native Americans got smallpox and other such diseases… and many other examples throughout history. I remember reading about how the Spanish inadvertently infected the Mayans and that epidemic wiped out a vast majority of them in a pretty short time.
It seems the visitors/explorers always infect the natives, but not vice-versa. Why is that? I never hear about the new arrivals getting infected from the natives.
Maybe i’m wrong about this and have not read the right things, or maybe it’s a case of selective reporting. But it seems two groups of people who had been separated by vast distances would each have different diseases they are both immune and susceptible to. For example, were there no American diseases that Europeans were highly susceptible to? Why is it that the visitors always seem to infect the natives but not the other way around? Seems to be a strange lack of parity…