4 ms·
It's less than a century old, first identified in the 60s and 70s, possibly coming from Rocky Mountain sheep farming operations in the early 1900s per http://cw
by LeifCarrotson 8y ago
It's less than a century old, first identified in the 60s and 70s, possibly coming from Rocky Mountain sheep farming operations in the early 1900s per http://cwd-info.org/faq/ http://cwd-info.org/faq/.
The reason it's fairly new is that it kills the deer, and so requires high population densities to spread. At low levels, an infected deer would die off quickly, and if the population density is low, another deer is unlikely to get infected. Without wolves, and with the huge farm operations that give deer thousands of acres of corn in which to feed, deer are so overpopulated that even if an infection kills quickly, the deer is likely to spread the disease to others.
See also http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/americapox http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/americapox for a discussion on similar problems in human history: TLDR; old-world cities with immigrants and animals in close contact allowed diseases to develop that never developed in the old world.
- dayofthedaleks 8y agodo you perhaps mean 'new-world cities with immigrants'?
- vraivroo 8y agoor even better, let's just say "American cities" if that's what we mean, no sense using dated and confusing terminology.
- Fomite 8y agoExcept that the cities in question are not exclusively American...
- whatusername 8y agono -- OP meant the opposite of that. "Old-world" meaning anyone that traded with or interacted with the descendants of the first cities in the fertile crescent (aka anyone from Africa / Asia or Europe). "old-world cities with immigrants and animals in close contact allowed diseases to develop that never developed in the new world"
- srl 8y ago(Having watched the video): No, GP does mean "old-world cities with immigrants". However, GP meant to end with "that never developed in the new world". The story, in brief: old-world cities, which were crowded, always had a fresh supply of (non-immune) immigrants, and had lots of human/animal contact, allowed the development of particularly lethal diseases. Such diseases did not develop in the new world, which lacked such cities. Thus there was no "americapox" to spread from the new world to the old. I repeat the story without knowing/endorsing accuracy.