On 2/8/2022 11:09 PM, Jim Vassilakos - jim.vassilakos at gmail.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> How do colds, flus, and various communicable pathogens work in your Traveller
> universe? Yes, I know that worlds can get whacked (as in sterilized) by the
> Imperial Navy when they have a pathogen on the loose that is so dangerous, the
> Imperium cannot risk its continued existence. But aside from that sort of thing,
> which I suppose is extremely rare, what devilish viruses might develop in a
> population of many, many trillions of humans constituting a wide variety of
> genotypes, including many near-humans, such as the Zhodani? Or would all the bad
> viruses (or nearly all) be easily exterminated by Traveller-era medicine? Or,
> going in the other direction, would there be a million different colds and flus
> bouncing around from planet to planet, so that instead of getting vaccinated
> annually or even semi-annually, it's more like a monthly or even weekly ritual?
>

	One of the ideas introduced by the GURPS rules was the idea of a broad spectrum
vaccine. The current modern day vaccines are very specific to one variant of a
virus, but with the newer mRNA techniques the vaccines are getting better at
triggering immunity for several different strains of the same virus.

	Projecting that forward a few TLs (even with slow advancement of the Traveller
TLs) you could quite imagine that many pathogens won't get a chance to get a
foothold simply because the vast majority of the population would be immune.

--
         Thomas Jones-Low
Work:	xxxxxx@softstart.com
Home:   xxxxxx@gmail.com