crowd disease
English
Noun
crowd disease (plural crowd diseases)
- A disease that is spread from person to person, with no animal reservoir.
- 2011, Patricia J. Campbell, Aran MacKinnon, & Christy R. Stevens, An Introduction to Global Studies, →ISBN, page 190:
- Crowd diseases, which are among the oldest established infections that humans have endured, emerged in the Old World centers of Mesopotamian civilization (the region now occupied by modern Iraq, eastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey) and India, where settled agricultural and pastoral societies developed.
- 2013, Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, →ISBN:
- The crowd diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago. Only with the explosive population growth made possible by agriculture did human populations reach the high numbers required to sustain our crowd diseases.
- 2013, John S. Mackenzie, Martyn Jeggo, & Peter Daszak, One Health, →ISBN:
- While hunter–gatherers had lived in a relatively peaceful relationship with microorganisms, by keeping their own numbers at a level the local environment could sustain, the Neolithic farmers created conditions that would eventually let humans experience and maintain crowd diseases.
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See also
- crowd-poisoning