medicine

MWadwell wrote:

cralkhi wrote:(SNIP)

And I don't know if you're ever going to get a full microbial ecosystem in bodies of water that is totally safe to drink -- maybe it is possible with their kind of biotech, I don't know.

Who's to say that the original Adam's and Eve's weren't genetically modified to make them resistent to baterial infections....

Make it a dominant gene, and it would help the colonists survive in a low tech environment!

I don't think you could just "tune up" the immune system beyond a certain point without causing auto-immune disorders.

Now, there are genes (CCR5-Δ32, sickle-cell trait...) that confer some resistance to specific diseases by affecting the specific thing they attack -- but they're not generic disease-resistance, so you'd have to know what disease ahead of time, and some of them have bad side-effects especially when you get two copies (sickle-cell trait gives resistance to malaria, but two copies means sickle-cell anemia),

You'd need something "extra", and we know the Federation had anti-disease nanotech, which seems to be injected once and last a lifetime, but they couldn't (or at least didn't) make it hereditary on Safehold.

EDIT: There probably isn't anything as generic as 'bacteria resistance' possible, given how many bacteria are a normal part of human life...

cralkhi wrote:There may not be anything for Safeholdians to vaccinate against. If the people and animals brought to Safehold didn't have diseases (and why would they?) I don't think many would have evolved in a mere 900-some years; most new diseases tend to jump from animals to humans.

Maybe antibiotics are used specifically for stuff like infected wounds. Do we know that Safehold has regular infectious disease?

I advanced this argument previously and was rather thoroughly rebuffed. I still hold that given the capability of federation nanotech (I believe Merlin makes a comment about Cayleb never getting sick...ever) and the long process of quarantine imposed by the journey to safehold should have been sufficient to eliminate all pathogenic disease from the human colonists. Further in other universes (Honorverse for example) that it is rare, but not impossible for native lifeforms to mutate to cause human disease given their differences.

Therefore the colonists should have been starting with a clean slate. Parasites and prions are probably out for good. The trouble are bacteria and viruses. Humans are colonized with so many necessary bacteria, which in turn are colonized by necessary viruses that even if nanotech were capable of eliminating them, the could not without hopelessly disrupting human biology. Therefore these should have formed a reserve that could fairly readily (I would think within years, if not certainly decades) mutate to produce disease once more. We do have clear textev evidence that disease is present on Safehold.

DW points out that Safeholdians are aware of the presence of bacteria thanks to Pasquale, I do think that the new methods of thinking more than technology would enable to them to push vaccine development as well as anti-sera. Scienctists in the early 1900's did some amazing things with antisera. Furthermore vaccine development isn't a process which can be codified as a cookbook "do this then this", it essentially requires the scientific method and trial and error to do. Pasquale could have provided them with the "recipe" for a vaccine for a specific disease, but the odds are that disease will have changed too much in the subsequent centuries for that recipe to still work and I doubt Pasquale would risk publishing a technique in the writ that was bound to become obsolete eventually.