system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5: why didn't the spanish die of native american diseases but the other way around?
gpt
Mainly because there weren't many virulent diseases that humans in the Americas suffered from. Syphilis is the disease most commonly associated with the Americas, but even this has been disputed. One theory as to why there were so few diseases in the Americas were because of how spread out people were and that domestication of animals wasn't very common on the continent. Another reason was because, unlike Europeans, Native Americans had an actual sense of hygiene. Comparatively Europe was a giant petri dish of disease. People lived very close to one another, we're in contact with other animals (and their waste) on a daily basis, and had infamously terrible cleanliness. All these factors allowed for diseases like smallpox and plague to thrive and evolve in preindustrial Europe.