Transoceanic pathogen circulation in the age of sail and steam

Abstract

In the centuries following Christopher Columbuss 1492 voyage to the Americas, transoceanic travel opened unprecedented pathways for global pathogen circulation. Yet no biological transfer is a single, discrete event. We use mathematical modeling to quantify historical risk of shipborne pathogen introduction, exploring the respective contributions of journey time, ship size, population susceptibility, transmission intensity, density dependence, and pathogen biology. We contextualize our results using port arrivals data from San Francisco, 1850-1852, and from a selection of historically significant voyages, 1492-1918. We offer numerical estimates of introduction risk across historicallyrealistic ranges of journey time and ship population size, and show that both steam travel and shipping regimes that involved frequent, large-scale movement of people substantially increased risk of transoceanic pathogen circulation.