On 9/2/22 14:09, 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?
>
> -----
>

Well, firstly, my answer depends on _which_ MTU you're talking about.

Naturallyverse - GT , c 1130s/1140s Imperial, so Imperium Eternal (I think).

The broad-spectrum panimmunity gubbins that Collision mentioned are
cheap and widely available, thanks to centuries of mass production for
military forces of all stripes - Daryen Confederation Marine Corps,
Imperial Interstellar Scout Service, the varied and many Unified Armies,
Solomani Confederation Navy, etc, etc, and thence onto high population
worlds, and down from there in self defence.

There are also strong customary norms against bioweapon use, thanks to
bitter historical experience.

Obvious joke is obvious - "The Marines wanted yer to have a bitchin'
immune system, so they _isshered_ yer with one".

As there are many variant human races running around (not all of them
necessarily mutually interfertile, or lacking mutual biochemical
barriers), I have said panimmunity treatments being both very broad
spectrum, and also available in variants to suit the
further-from-baseline human variants.  And that's not to mention
non-human sophonts, who are also covered (yes, including those bastions
of meat-eating tolerance, the K'Kree).

Despite all that, nature still finds ways - with such massive cliffs to
scale, the evolutionary payoff for a pathogen that can do so is
_immense_.  It's fairly rare across a multi-sector polity level, but
occasionally some determined little microbe gains such a foothold.

Advisoryverse - GT:ISW, c 2120s/2130s AD - Early (and divergent)
Interstellar Wars

What panimmunity?

The Ziru Sirka's comparatively deficient biotech ain't up to it.  Modulo
the wonder pharmacopeia available from 15k-odd worlds, it's actually
behind Our Time Line.

And that's before they run into the deathworld known as Terra, let alone
the nasty segment of it known as STRAYA.

The newly-formed Terran Confederation has been barreling ahead in
technological progress - the brick ain't on the accelerator, said
accelerator is welded to the floor.

What the TC hasn't had is _time_.  Remember, the _first_ Terran-built
jump drive was only fired up in 2088 - not merely within living memory,
but within the _direct_ memory of a moderate chunk of the population. 
Starleaper One sodded off nine years later.  The crash program to swipe
J-2 only landed in 2124.  It's very characteristic of Terrans that
within 5 years of attaining J-2, a private concern (Toyota Shipworks,
out of Prometheus) has designed, built and started trialling a variant
J-2 drive.

Diseases are still running wild, on and off Terra.  I figure the initial
drive towards panimmunity would come again from military purposes -
namely, the Terran Draft.

Andrea Vallance initially proposed the idea of Terran bioweapon use in
retaliation for Erasharshi trying to set up Terra the bomb - I'm
planning to take that, and extend it somewhat.

What I have roughed in at the moment is engineered pathogens being
deployed on Shululsish (as per Andrea's original idea), _plus_ somewhere
upstream of Shulgiasu - severing two of the three major trade routes
connecting the Rim Province to the Imperial core, and having the
remaining one running through the Vegan Worlds.  Since the Vegan talent
for passive resistance is, canonically, sufficient to drive Vilani
bureaucrats far enough away that the Vegans get left to their own
devices, the aftermath (political, and economic) promises to be interesting.

I have yet to figure out how horribly right this goes, or how many
Vilani worlds the AZS ends up sterilising.

Alex