NEET BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Smallpox contributed to the decline of the Aztec Empire, in what is now Mexico, following the virus’s arrival with Spanish conquerors in 1519. More than three million Aztec succumbed to the disease.

Detailed explanation-2: -Most horrific of all, they’d bleed from their eyes, mouth, and nose, then die within a few days. Over the next five years, the disease-then called “cocoliztli, ” or “pestilence”-killed between seven and 17 million people. Scientists and historians have long wondered what the source of this mysterious epidemic was.

Detailed explanation-3: -Smallpox took its toll on the Aztecs in several ways. First, it killed many of its victims outright, particularly infants and young children.

Detailed explanation-4: -Within five years as many as 15 million people – an estimated 80% of the population – were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.

Detailed explanation-5: -The most devastating epidemics – called cocoliztli – have been blamed variously on measles, smallpox and typhus. Recent analysis of DNA from the teeth of people buried during a cocoliztli suggests that Salmonella enterica may have been partly to blame.