Tararoys wrote:Now, if I were the planners of Operation Ark, I would remove every communicable disease I could from the population. Aides, Chlamydia, Influenza, measles, mumps, the works. For you more scientifically minded denizens, what diseases could have been successfully eradicated? Which ones would it have been impossible to eradicate?
I'm thinking that since every colonist had nanotech killing off all infectious germs in their hosts, that pretty much every disease we know wouldn't have had hosts that could actually host them. Only when people started having children did a vulnerable population, one that could host diseases, emerge. Would the children have emerged fast enough to support, say, the flu?
And how much would Pasquale be able to leave out of the book of Pasquale because there was no need to enumerate all the various diseases?
Duchairn is referred to has having a cold, so I think the rhinovirus made it. What other diseases do you think traveled from earth?
Infectious disease is a bit of a hobby for me as my mother is an Infectious Disease MD specialist and my brother is an Immunology PDH. (Although I don't have any formal education in the area).
Scientifically speaking, your point is an excellent observation. Practically nothing -should- have survived the move from Earth given some of the technologies we've seen and even a slight bit of caution on the command crew's part. Let's talk about the different vectors.
Certainly, no diseases that have an exclusive human host would have survived in a 100% nanovacinated population. This should include everything on the list of diseases that we're working on Eradicating today, and a whole lot more that aren't on the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradicati ... s_diseasesDiseases that have nonhuman hosts are a bit tougher. The flu, for instance, interacts with humans, birds, and pigs. However, livestock in the colony mission would have had to be grown from embryos or put in cryo. I'm betting on the embryos, which would have eliminated that vector for disease.
I suppose that command crew pets would be a vector (remember that Shan Wei had hampsters). However, I would expect that any animals (either pets or livestock) would have "had their shots" which probably would have included a nanovacine.
Environmental vector diseases such as Tetanus (commonly found in dirt) and the various versions of Staph (commonly found on human skin and in the nose) would be harder to get rid of. I'd probably classify Rhinovirus in this group. But a deep clean and decontamination on the colony ships might have been able to eliminate them too.
The final grouping of infectious diseases is those that arise from good microbes in bad circumstances. The human gut has (and needs) a huge number of different microbes. Spread to other parts of the human body, these can cause issues. Similarly, I would speculate that the microbes used in food production (yogurt, cheese, yeast for breads) could mutate or get into situations where they cause problems. And who knows what microbiomes are considered necessary for terraformed cropland! This risk is probably not possible to eliminate, but who knows how it might have been mitigated with the gene engineering tech present in this store.
All of this leaves aside the concept of a 'homegrown' alien disease that can affect humans. David talked about this in the Honorverse a bit, but we have no scientific baseline.
