“Guns, Germs, and Steel”
Lethal Gift of Livestock
by Jared Diamond
Name ___________________ pd____
1. Epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now ________________________________________________.
2. Winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often
merely those bearing the ______________________________________________________________.
3. In the Americas, whose diseases killed the other?
4. Basically, microbes evolve like other species. Evolution _____________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.
How do humans contract salmonella bacteria?
5. How do malaria, plague, and typhus spread using mosquitoes, fleas, and lice?
6. From the microbes’ point of view, why is a syphilis genital sore beneficial?
7. Name the ways the following diseases transmit themselves:
a. common cold
=
b. cholera
=
c. hemorrhagic fever =
d. rabies
=
e. schistosomes
=
8. Is it in the interest of the germ to make us sick or kill us? The germ wants us to do what for it?
9. Why does our body heat up when we get some diseases?
10. That’s the principal of vaccination: _____________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________.
11. As a result, over the course of history, human populations ___________________________________
________________________________________________________________________--just.
12. Why is the number 21 million significant?
13. Why is ¼ or 70 percent significant?
14. Why do epidemic diseases come in waves? And, what is needed for the epidemic disease to come back?
15. Why is the number half a million significant?
16. Name two locations diseases of small human populations can hide, thereby being able to reinfect the
humans again.
17. What is a suggested reason for the rise of crowd diseases (epidemic diseases)?
18. Name three reasons crowd diseases are connected to sedentary populations (farming, city, large
populations).
a. .
b. .
c. .
19. If humans are infected with a ‘new’ disease, besides other humans, name one other social animal we
may have contracted the disease from. 1.
20. Complete the table below: table 11.1 deadly gifts from our animal friends.
Human disease
Animal with Most Closely related disease
Measles
Tuberculosis
Smallpox
Flu
21. Name three diseases that are still only contracted from our pets, not from other humans:
a. .
b. .
c. .
22. What is the significance of 99.5%, 90%, and 25% from the virus’s perspective?
23. How did the Spaniard Cortes and his army of 600 defeat the Aztec Empire of millions? Or Pizarro
against the Incan Empire?
24. Based on the past chapter, why didn’t Cortes and Pizarro die from smallpox?
25. What happened to the population of millions of Native Americans between 1492 and 1538?
26. Name 11 European diseases that infected peoples of the Americas?
1.
2.
3.
5.
6.
7.
9.
10.
11.
27. Name one possible disease that spread from the Americas to Europe.
4.
8.