Will increased International Travel make the world healthier or sicker?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Bear with me. I am not a “science guy” so I may confuse some concepts.

But today I was reading an article about a new strain of Virulant HIV that turns to AIDS much quicker.

I wondered if it was a new strain or was some kind of a “crossbreed” (see I am not a science guy) of two different strains.

All of this got me thinking about an article I read in one of Cecil’s books about how the Indians were decimated by European Diseases (small pox, influenza, etc.) yet far fewer Europeans were killed by Indian diseases.

One of the points made was that Europeans had greater immunity due to exposure of a larger number of diseases. This was credit to greater travel and trade in Europe (and Africa, and Asia to a limited degree) by the Europeans.

Indian trade was more localized.

So this leads to my question: Now that we live in the New World Order where everything is international and there are fewer “borders” keeping people isolated in their section of the world, will our inevitable exposure to a greater number of viruses and sicknesses lead to stronger immune systems or will the result be super “crossbred” illnesses that will be harder fight (is that what caused SARS?)?

Any thoughts?

2

Increased travel will lead to death by disease of many people. However, the ones who survive will be healthier.

The master puts the death toll in the Americas at approx 70 million. However, bubonic plague killed 137 million people in Europe in a series of epidemics. It’s not that Europeans died less from disease: They’d just already acquired immunities to most diseases.

3

What I meant was they died less from disease in a head to head matchup with the Indian germs.

4

In the long run, healthier. In the short run, very much sicker. Imagine, now a person who catches a tropical disease from a monkey or whatever can be in pretty much any major global city in less than 24 hours. I’ve read a bit somewhere on the link between the spread of AIDS and the Kinshasha Highway - travel is going to make populations sicker in the short term.

Think of the flu pandemic in 1918 - vulnerable populations in Fiji and among the Inuit were absolutely slaughtered because they didn’t have the immunities other people did, but that dosen’t mean people didn’t die in cities like Philadelphia and New York, where one could expect to be exposed to a whole lot of bugs of all descriptions.