In a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers in the United States of America used mathematical modeling to study the risk of shipborne pathogen introduction during the historical sea travel era. Elizabeth Blackmore and James Lloyd-Smith of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, found that steam travel and shipping regimes with frequent, large-scale translocation of people significantly elevated the risk of transoceanic pathogen circulation. Study: Transoceanic pathogen transfer in the age of sail and steam .
Image Credit: iurii / Shutterstock Following Christopher Columbus's 1492 journey, transoceanic voyages significantly facilitated global pathogen circulation, a process described by historian Woodrow Borah in 1962 as rapid and inevitable. However, this narrative of swift pathogen transfer is an oversimplification. Scholars have shown that the globalization of infectious diseases was a gradual process spanning centuries, influenced by mass migration, the steam revolution, and modern air travel.
Historians have expanded on Borah's work, highlighting that pathogen introductions to isolated regions took one to two centuries and were highly contingent on human activities like trade, warfare, and colonialism. Disease ecologists have noted that pathogens like measles and influenza require large populations for endemic establishment, with smaller populations relying on r.