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Within different ancient civilizations, the geography could dramatically influence the disease and its likelihood of being discovered. As it can be seen in cholera and typhoid fever, water systems play largely into disease as the mechanism of interaction or in other ways. As T. Aidan Cockburn argues, a strong means of spreading disease, in ancient populations from the very dawn of man to the present, is through the simple interaction of a host, parasite and environment (45). For instance, consider that the Nile River provided rich subsidence for the Egyptian population as a means for bathing, drinking, and water irrigation for crops. According to Cockburn, insects like "Anopheles mosquitoes" which can carry malaria, breed in bodies of water like pools or lakes (49). Malaria then spreads like wildfire, killing off a vast statistical degree of population, as each mosquito can easily transmit it to the unsuspecting human. .
Furthermore, it has been found that ancient techniques of agriculture just as much had an impact on diseases' occurrence and evasiveness. Agricultural practices in "Chinese, Egyptian, Sumerian and Inca" civilizations relied heavily on "the production of crops supported by irrigation" (Cockburn, 49). Feces, a heavily used means of fertilizer in these places (which continues in present-day South Korea and China), reacted with water run off as well as skin of those farming to spread a variety of disease (49). Feces, of human beings or animals, is ripe with ingested eggs of a variety of parasites. One particularly nasty critter is the liver fluke Schistosoma, which are able to "penetrate the unbroken human skin (of a) man" and "infect merely by wading or swimming in water containing them" (49). Logically, either through stepping barefoot on water being poured on the fertile ground, through washing rituals or even recreational swimming, each person was victim to flukes.