It makes sense - there’s people, non-human animals, and crops being shared back and forth; anything piggybacking on those three, such as parasites, would have an easier time spreading out.
The Roman baths were… well, disgusting. More likely to spread filth than get rid of it. Basically, if you were to join the bath with a dirty butthole, well, now everyone joining it with/after you will share your poop bacteria or parasites! This is from a culture before we had a good idea on how diseases happen, so they assumed that scumming off the water grime would solve it, it didn’t.
Additionally they had a fair bit of prejudice interfering on their sanitary practices. For example, a civilised Roman is supposed to smear olive oil over their body and scrape it off with a strigil; unlike, for example, the “ooga booga” (Celts) up north who’d use balls made of animal fat cooked with ashes. We know those balls nowadays by names like “soap”, by the way.
It’s also understandable that garum spread fish parasites. Garum needs to be made with uncooked fish, since the fish’s digestive enzymes play a role breaking down its flesh, and once cooked they stop working. As garum is extremely salty odds are that it killed a lot of stuff, but not anything forming cysts to shield itself from the brine.
With all that in mind, given the American Flu (aka “Spanish” Flu; or, if you’d rather pick a less biased name, Great Influenza) and COVID… I don’t think that we (people living in contemporary times) have much of a ground to look at the Romans and laugh at them. We’re just like this too, if not worse.
It makes sense - there’s people, non-human animals, and crops being shared back and forth; anything piggybacking on those three, such as parasites, would have an easier time spreading out.
The Roman baths were… well, disgusting. More likely to spread filth than get rid of it. Basically, if you were to join the bath with a dirty butthole, well, now everyone joining it with/after you will share your poop bacteria or parasites! This is from a culture before we had a good idea on how diseases happen, so they assumed that scumming off the water grime would solve it, it didn’t.
Additionally they had a fair bit of prejudice interfering on their sanitary practices. For example, a civilised Roman is supposed to smear olive oil over their body and scrape it off with a strigil; unlike, for example, the “ooga booga” (Celts) up north who’d use balls made of animal fat cooked with ashes. We know those balls nowadays by names like “soap”, by the way.
It’s also understandable that garum spread fish parasites. Garum needs to be made with uncooked fish, since the fish’s digestive enzymes play a role breaking down its flesh, and once cooked they stop working. As garum is extremely salty odds are that it killed a lot of stuff, but not anything forming cysts to shield itself from the brine.
With all that in mind, given the American Flu (aka “Spanish” Flu; or, if you’d rather pick a less biased name, Great Influenza) and COVID… I don’t think that we (people living in contemporary times) have much of a ground to look at the Romans and laugh at them. We’re just like this too, if not worse.