GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

Detailed explanation-1: -Of the many contagious diseases that the Europeans brought to plague the native Indians, the smallpox was the deadliest.

Detailed explanation-2: -Along with measles, influenza, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus, scarlet fever, pneumonia and malaria, smallpox spelled disaster for Native Americans, who lacked immunity to such diseases.

Detailed explanation-3: -’A wonderful plague’ Modern scholars have argued that indigenous communities were devastated by leptospirosis, a disease caused by Old World bacteria that had likely reached New England through the feces of rats that arrived on European ships.

Detailed explanation-4: -The hantavirus-like haemorrhagic fever spread across the Yucatan peninsula in 1545 and again in 1576, killing 17 million people, including 80 percent of the native Indians. The same proportion of the population died in Europe during the Black Plague.