People always say that Sentinel Island / other uncontacted tribes would immediately die if we accidentally got them sick, which is true! But is it possible THEY could also have illnesses that could absolutely annihilate US?
People always say that Sentinel Island / other uncontacted tribes would immediately die if we accidentally got them sick, which is true! But is it possible THEY could also have illnesses that could absolutely annihilate US?
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I would say that, yes, it is very possible! I’m not scientist, so maybe I don’t know. However, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to go both ways. If they are uncontacted, they might have a mutation of a strain that we haven’t encountered yet.
It is theoretically possible yes, but much less likely. If they naturally developed immunity to some virus/bacteria, then that virus/bacteria could simply have no hosts left and die out – though its also possible that they are carriers with no symptoms and the moment we come into contact, that would jump into us.
But that said, if that was the case, you can be sure someone like china or usa would just abduct a bunch of them to check their blood for vaccine, ignoring any ethical concerns (lets be real – if during height of covid a country learned that some native person on some island had antibodies, do you genuinely think they wouldn’t go for it?)
Possible but highly unlikely, the vast majority of devastating transmittable illnesses are either born in India, China or in the African jungle.
The former two provided huge masses of people throughout history in close contact with many farm animals, which is perfect to incubate and spread viruses and bacteria.
The later one is big enough to create animal pathogens, and has enough people in it to actually transmit it.
It’s the same question why the Americas got wiped out by European illnesses, but Europe wasn’t wiped out by American ones: they didn’t have the concentration of people, for long enough, with enough different domesticated animals, to actually spawn powerful diseases.
That’s also why nearly every year the new variant of the flu comes from China and spreads over the world, so many people on so little area (mostly east coast) is just the perfect lab condition to create a new variant each year.
There are exceptions of course, like the flu variant that came from Mexican or Russias cities, but it’s always: many people, little space, many animals
So on sentinel island, every pathogen they’ve is already present on the mainland (as it isn’t that far away) and they’ve no good way (a lot of people and little area, lots of different domesticated animals) to produce brand new ones
There are 8 billion of us maybe a couple hundred of them. Any pathogen we give to them doesn’t have far to go to wipe them out completely. We can just absorb the punch a lot better and would have a lot more time before we develop immunity, come up with vaccines, or the thing just goes away like the plague did.
All you really need to start off a new or novel communicable disease is to wait until something jumps from the local animal population to humans. So entirely possible.