In a previous blog post I wrote a bit about the reasons for the absolutely astonishing difference in technological advance between Eurasia and most of the rest of the world, up until the age of imperialism (when all that technological advancement was pushed onto that rest of the world.)
After all, Europe and large parts of East Asia had astonishingly advanced technology compared to the rest of the world: They had million-people cities, a very advanced money-based international economy, the printing press, firearms, ships that could sail across oceans, absolutely massive castles and cathedrals,big multi-storey buildings, extremely advanced and meticulously crafted musical instrument that were used in huge concerts in enormous lavish concert halls and theaters, and so on and so forth.
At the same time, in most of Africa and the American continent people lived literally in the Stone Age, in straw and mud huts, used tools made of wood and stone, very few had even figured out how to use metals for anything, and their most advanced technology was some primitive wooden bows, flutes and drums, and didn't even have a written language. The most advanced non-Eurasian civilizations lived in the South American continent, and had built massive temples out of stone and had actual written language, had developed some mathematical knowledge, were able to forge some metals (primarily for decorative purposes)... but that's about it. They hadn't invented even so much as a wheel.
Yet, regardless of the astonishing advances that particularly Europe had developed, there's one thing that took an astonishingly and incomprehensibly long amount of time for them to figure out. It's mind-boggling how it took them so long.
You see, there was one disadvantage to the advanced technology: And that was that particularly Europe and big parts of Asia were plagued by, well, literally plagues. Epidemics were so common, and had been for literally several millenia, that they were considered outright normal and almost inevitable. And the worst epidemics semi-regularly wiped out a good chunk of the entire population.
In contrast, in Africa and especially the American continent there were never plagues (until the arrival of the Europeans). There were some contagious diseases yes, but they are much rarer and never rose to plague levels that would regularly wipe out most of the population.
There are three main reasons for plagues (reasons that didn't exist in those other places): Domestication of animals, huge megacities where enormous amounts of people lived cramped together, and lack of hygiene.
The vast majority of pandemics have an animal origin, and it was precisely the domestication of animals that elevated the risk of a disease jumping the barrier to humans from almost non-existent to regular (because domestication meant that hundreds of thousands, even millions of people would live daily in close proximity to domesticated animals, even in physical contact with them. This increases the likelihood of a viral or bacterial mutation making the jump to humans orders of magnitude higher.)
Even then, pandemics only work if there is a lot of people in contact with each other, and big cities were exactly that: Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, in some cases even millions of people living close together and being in constant contact with each other. This is fertile ground for epidemics to spread.
But there's still one condition that most epidemics need in order spread effectively: And that's the lack of hygiene. Indeed, a huge amount of the biggest epidemics in human history could have been completely avoided, or at least greatly diminished, if people had had good hygiene practices (and didn't eg. mix waste water with drinking water.)
And it's precisely that last thing that took humanity an astonishingly long amount of time to figure out. Literally thousands of years!
One wouldn't think it would be so difficult: Dirt, filth, human and animal waste, rotten meat and animal products... it all smells bad, tastes bad and is very unpleasant, and much of it makes you immediately sick.
There's actually an evolutionary reason why we find eg. rotten meat and excrement so utterly unpleasant, why it smells and tastes so bad that causes nausea and vomiting: It's a defense mechanism that multicellular life evolved very early on, naturally selected precisely because avoiding contact with those things greatly increased survival.
So it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that filth, waste, excrement and rotten animal products cause disease. Shouldn't take a genius to figure out that cleaning all the filth, from yourself, from your home, from the utensils you use to eg. eat, and drinking only clean water, would avoid disease.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason it took literally thousands of years for people to figure such a simple thing out. For literally millenia we lived in cities where waste was just thrown on the streets, where sewage water was carelessly mixed with drinking water (eg. in rivers), and where not even the most basic of hygiene practices were followed when eating or even practicing medicine.
Indeed, there was a period of hundreds of years in many European countries when eg. a mother giving birth in a hospital had a significantly higher chance of either the baby, the mother or both dying, than if giving birth at home. The reason? Doctors wouldn't even so much as wash their hands before delivering a baby! They could literally be dissecting a rotting corpse, and then go deliver a baby with not so much as washing their hands.
It took an incredible amount of time before doctors started making the connection between filth and disease, and how hygiene significantly reduced infection and disease. It took even longer for the medical community at large to accept that fact.
You don't need to know anything about germ theory in order to make that connection. Yet, for literally millenia they just didn't. It's just incredible.
Nowadays we know extremely well what causes contagious disease and how important hygiene is to reduce the risks (so much so that surgeons go through an extreme "cleansing ritual" before every single surgery, where they make extra sure to wash out every single pathogen from themselves.)
This has reduced the amount of plagues substantially. Essentially, about the only epidemics and pandemics that happen anymore are the ones where hygiene cannot stop them from spreading (such as viral infections that spread through aerosols, for example influenza.)
How we did not figure this out already a thousand years ago, I have no idea.
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