[escepticos] Conspiranoia vírica

[Felipe Martínez Pastor]

No puedo acceder al segundo artículo, pero me pregunto si por "native
American" no se referirán sólo a los de los EUA y Canadá.

     What follows is not an attempt to condemn or exonerate Jeffery
Amherst. The man's documentary record speaks loudly enough regarding his
character, if not regarding his ultimate culpability for the smallpox
that struck Indians near Fort Pitt in 1763 and 1764. Nor is this essay
an exhaustive accounting of all the accusations and incidents of
biological warfare in late-eighteenth-century North America. It is,
however, an attempt to broaden the debate and to place it in context.2
Our preoccupation with Amherst has kept us from recognizing that
accusations of what we now call biological warfare—the military use of
smallpox in particular—arose frequently in eighteenth-century America.
Native Americans, moreover, were not the only accusers. By the second
half of the century, many of the combatants in America's wars of empire
had the knowledge and technology to attempt biological warfare with the
smallpox virus. Many also adhered to a code of ethics that did not
constrain them from doing so. Seen in this light, the Amherst affair
becomes not so much an aberration as part of a larger continuum in which
accusations and discussions of biological warfare were common, and
actual incidents may have occurred more frequently than scholars have
previously acknowledged.

Más en:
http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/86.4/fenn.html

Otro artículo:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/MayorSmallpox.pdf
En éste mencionan lo de mandar costras de viruela a los incas, pero
citan fechas muy distantes entre sí, de cuando ocurrió (1493) y cuando
se puso sobre papel (1613). Los documentos de la parte británica parecen
ser contemporáneos.

Y en este, dicen algo interesante
(http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/830328-overview):
In the Americas, smallpox decimated the native population, who never had
been exposed to variola, when it followed closely behind the European
explorers in the 1600s. The British forces at FortPitt (Pittsburgh, Pa)
*unsuccessfully* tried to weaken Native American forces during the
French and Indian War by giving them smallpox-contaminated blankets and
goods.1  Whether because of this or through natural spread, the
subsequent epidemic carried a mortality rate of 50% among native tribes.

Saludos.
Felipe

JM Mulet escribió:
> Insisto en que no es mito. Al menos he encontrado referencias e revistas serias
> de historia y de medicina:
> 
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18271127?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=2
> 
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12003378?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_SingleItemSupl.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=3&log$=relatedreviews&logdbfrom=pubmed
> 
> 
>