Were Native Americans doomed to be wiped out by disease?

[BWV]

This is not a credible source. I know that this is the social sciences forum but please stick to published research rather than magazine articles.

Mann is a credible popular science writer who summarizes a large body of research in his book 1492 and the Atlantic Article, which summarizes much of it. Much more productive for an amateur discussion than digging up a bunch of potentially conflicting journal articles when no one has the expertise to understand on which issues there is consensus and which are currently being debated

Michael Coe,

Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Yale University, is recognized for his work on the archaeology and ethnohistory of Mesoamerica, the historical archaeology of the northeastern United States, and ancient writing systems. He is the author of many books on Mesoamerica, including Breaking the Maya Code (Thames and Hudson, 1992; revised edition, 1999).

reviewed the work positively in the American Scientist (http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-old-new-world)

writing:

Reading 1491, one soon learns about the horrifying devastation that Old World diseases worked throughout the New World. This was the greatest demographic disaster ever suffered by Homo sapiens. In Mesoamerica alone, only 10 percent of the Indian population was alive a century after the Conquest. As Jared Diamond has made clear in his justly renowned Guns, Germs, and Steel, these scourges ran ahead of the European invaders, so that the seeds of defeat were already planted in empires like the Aztec and Inca even before the conquistadores arrived.
...

Mann has written an impressive and highly readable book. Even though one can disagree with some of his inferences from the data, he does give both sides of the most important arguments. 1491 is a fitting tribute to those Indians, present and past, whose cause he is championing

 

[mheslep]

I had long thought, from reading popularly here and there, that Native Americans were at such a disadvantage to the Europeans from disease was because Europe had i) the widespread existence of large cities with dense populations and ii) centuries of long distance trade/and or conquest in Europe, Africa and Asia. Travel and dense cities acted together to create more virulent diseases and, over time, build immunity. See going back to Alexander, where he and his armies suffered plagues as they traveled through Africa and Asia, the same tale repeating with subsequent invaders through the centuries. The Europeans and nature thus had several thousand years to both create diseases and adapt to them, a period which the native North Americans in continental isolation never had.