Introduction of foreign pathogens into Australia

Introduction of foreign pathogens into Australia

It is widely known that the poor health experienced by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders relates from complex reasons originating from their history after European settlement. Two centuries of introduced disease, combined with today’s lifestyle diseases and impoverished socioeconomic and environmental conditions, have had devastating, and all too often fatal, effects on Indigenous health. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population suffered from introduced disease that often turned out to be fatal because of lack of immunity to introduced pathogens.

In 1788, Indigenous Australians were totally healthier than most Europeans of that time, whether it was socially, emotionally or physically. But when the Europeans came, their diseases killed many of the Aborigines without even lifting a hand.

There were an estimated 5000 Aborigines living in Tasmania when the British first arrived in 1803. Living in small groups, they had survived for millennia in the island's extreme wilderness, hunting kangaroos and gathering shellfish along the coast.

By the end of the 19th century they had been all but wiped out, in what has long been regarded as one of the darkest periods in Australia's history which many thinks was caused by introduced pathogens by Europeans.

People have said that introduced disease was used as an international weapon of extermination especially in the case of the Australian Aborigines. The Aborigines were so affected by the introduced pathogens because their immune systems had never encountered that kind of disease before so they had not developed any immunity at all and so succumbed to disease very easily.

The first major smallpox epidemic among Aborigines was in April 1789, fifteen months after first settlement. The second was in 1829-31, its origin never determined. Many people have suggested and even written books about it that smallpox and other various killer diseases were deliberately introduced by the First Fleet to the Aborigines to kill them off easily.

Diseases introduced by convicts and settlers - smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, influenza, pneumonia, measles and venereal disease - seriously depleted Aboriginal numbers. There was a massive population loss in central Australia - particularly in the region of what is now Alice Springs - between 1860 and 1895.