Times of the Islands Spring 2021

This llustrated panel from the 16th-century Florentine Codex depicts a Mesoamerican infected with smallpox.
Fever was the only symptom mentioned at the time.
Illness was attributed to the change of climate, diet and
hard work; but since more than eleven weeks had passed
since they left the Canary Islands, scurvy could be implicated.
Scurvy is a debilitating disease caused by a lack of
vitamin C in the diet; symptoms can appear in as little as
a month and left untreated it can quickly lead to death
from infection or bleeding. Or maybe the illness afflicting
the Spaniards was an indigenous form of malaria?
Another possibility is a type of influenza that starts
in pigs (H1N1). Pigs were first brought to the Americas
on Columbus’s second voyage. The close association of
pigs and humans in confined ship spaces could implicate
“swine flu” as an epidemic agent. (The transmission of
disease from infected animals to humans is called “zoonotic
spillover.”) It is possible that the Spaniards who
died at La Isabela succumbed to the flu, perhaps even a
variant of swine flu, which they could have introduced to
Hispaniola as early as 1493. We may never know which
diseases were introduced by the Spanish, although recent
advances in ancient DNA research have identified the
genetic signatures of some diseases in human skeletons.
Wear a mask, wash your hands,
socially distance, get vaccinated
In recent centuries, modern Indigenous communities in
tropical South America have suffered the highest mortality
(circa 25%) from measles, malaria and influenza
epidemics. However, the first reported case of measles
in the Americas dates to 1765, so measles is an unlikely
candidate for a late 15th century epidemic. Less virulent
strains of malaria were present in the pre-Colonial
Americas. If present in the Caribbean, then the Taíno
may have developed some level of immunity. People
who live in highly endemic malaria settings develop
immunity to symptoms by puberty. Its main symptom is
“cyclical” fevers, where the fevers rise and fall as parasites
move between the liver and the blood stream to
reproduce. This would explain how malaria might have
had a greater impact on Spanish health and potentially
deaths. Nevertheless, the most deadly malarial parasite
(Plasmodium falciparum) was first transported to the
Americas with enslaved Africans beginning in the mid-
1500s. Here again, malaria is not a good candidate for
an earlier epidemic among the Taínos.
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