Invasive Exotic Diseases
History is rife with the spread of exotic diseases, such as the introduction of smallpox into the indigenous peoples of the Americas by the Spanish, where it obliterated entire populations of indigenous civilizations before they were ever even seen by Europeans.
Problematic exotic disease introductions in the past century or so include the chestnut blight which has almost eliminated the American Chestnut tree from its forest habitat, and Dutch elm disease, which has severely reduced the American Elm trees in forests and cities.
Read more about this topic: Introduced Species
Famous quotes containing the words invasive, exotic and/or diseases:
“The frequency of personal questions grows in direct proportion to your increasing girth. . . . No one would ask a man such a personally invasive question as “Is your wife having natural childbirth or is she planning to be knocked out?” But someone might ask that of you. No matter how much you wish for privacy, your pregnancy is a public event to which everyone feels invited.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)
“Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)