diseases

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welsh

Junkmaster
Yesterday I was thinking about what a person would do if they contracted Rabies in a post-apocalyptic world. It's also likely that such diseases as rabies would be more common and more deadly as treatments would be rarer.

What other diseases? Bubonic Plague, probably. Various sexually transmitted diseases as well. Cholera? Yellow Fever?

Seems this is something that wasn't fully exploited in Fallout.
 
Also thinking about what mutations would occur.

You get a standard flu, gets some nice irradiation, and boom, you've got a much more difficult customer to deal with.
 
Bubonic Plague, probably.
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As far as I know, bubonic plague has been "wiped out" of the globe....
Not sure about it, though.
The "yellow fever" originates when a flu virus in large chicken populations mutates into a kind of virus that can affect humans.

Cholera and STD's would be the major problem in a wasteland post apoc-world... I lived in southeast Mexico for ten years, as a kid. I remember a lot of government pamphlets, special "classes" at school and ads on the tv. In fact, it's pretty easy to catch cholera in a "non hygienic" environment, and I doubt a post apoc wasteland would be a place full of water purification plants and antiseptic factories.

As for the STD's... I don't think I have to explain the flower and bees thing, do I?

Pope Viper wrote
You get a standard flu, gets some nice irradiation, and boom, you've got a much more difficult customer to deal with.
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In fact, the mutations in Fallout were due to the different strains of FEV virii, the mutated geckoes, ants etc. were supposed to be caused by large amounts of FEV released in the earth's atmosphere, after the facility that developed it was hit by an ICBM.
(Gives a new meaning to the word "Fallout", eh?)

In any case, most of humanity, and thus, most of humanity's virus/bacteria hosts were submitted to a thermonuclear city-cleansing programme. I doubt that many diseases would survive a full scale nuclear war.
The Vault Dwellers probably had some kind of "purification" process before entering the vaults ( 70's underground virus-proof complex movie reference )

Having diseases in both fallouts could be interesting to a certain point, fully applying the FEV rules to virii would result in a macrovirus that wiped out humanity ( except the vault dwellers) in the next year or so after the bomb...
 
Actually you still have outbreaks of bubonic plague in different parts of the world, including parts of the American mid and southwest where prairie dogs are considered to be one source of carriers.

I remember reading in the Morrow Project and in Twilight 2000 that both gaming systems predicted that the decline of public health, problems in food supply and the increase in unsanitary conditions would lead to the spread of disease which would further diminish the already depleted population.

How Fev might affect an disease like rabies would be interesting.
 
But wasnt FEV designed to kill off diseases ?
If I remember my Glow holodisks right, it was origonaly designed to be a virus that kept himans free of other stuff

or am I remembering wrong ?
 
Actually, an apocolypse might help destroy some diseases.

Disease results from civilization, so the destruction there of may actually help the situation.

Isolated communities would die off from diseases before spreading them and such. Highly concentrated populations are where you find the nastiest diseases, and the population would be relatively thinned out.

A lot of disease comes from animals though. Mostly monkeys and pigs now days. But there doesn't seem to be monkeys or pigs in fallout. Not sure if many diseases can spread from cow to man, so not sure what kind of effect that would have.

Of course radiated super viruses that can move from between any species could pop up....and that would pretty much be the end of it all.

Lots of interesting possibilities here.
 
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

And it's not as easily trasferred to humans as you think. If the cow is butchered properly, the infected parts of the cow are removed from the rest of the meat. Unfortunately, BSE can't be removed by cooking, the prions are extremely durable. Since they are not viruses, or bacteria. If I'm not mistaken, it is a sort of mutated DNA sequence.

http://www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/bse.html

And I do remember something about FEV being used to kill all infectious disease.
 
The prions that cause BSE aka Mad Cow disease are only located in the brain and spinal column of the cow. Like Dove said, if the cow is butchered properly, even one with the disease is safe to eat. Better safe than sorry in most cases, which is why the cow usually gets culled.
 
Pope_Viper said:
Also thinking about what mutations would occur.

You get a standard flu, gets some nice irradiation, and boom, you've got a much more difficult customer to deal with.
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Radioactive snot. Hmm.
 
The nr:1 desease in the world taking most lives every day is believe it or not malaria, this easily cured deaseas takes more lives a day than cancer/aid/whatever.
 
"You're a fallout junkie if: you get the flu and think it's radiation poisoning" ;)
 
Snake said:
The nr:1 desease in the world taking most lives every day is believe it or not malaria, this easily cured deaseas takes more lives a day than cancer/aid/whatever.
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I heard something totally else, though: I heard pneumonia and diarrhea are taking most lives everyday (things that are easily cured out here with some Imodium and some aspirin, maybe a small stay at the hospital). But that's in those parts in the world that Western people don't really know crap about, like India and Indonesia and Africa and so on.

We Western Koreans usually die from cancer and diseases of the heart and the arteries. That's because we like to drown ourselves in fat and nicotine and alcohol and lazy sweat. If we can't see how stupid that is, then we deserve to die that way. Simple.

And to know that a few boxes of Imodium (which is dead cheap in the West) could save complete villages in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia...

:oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops:

I'm telling you guys: it's a sad, sad planet. Newt time you buy a cd or a dvd or a game, you should try and think how many human lives you could save for that amount of money. Or: tell yourself that 6 billion people is 5 billion people too much anyway, and enjoy your newly purchased toys. :twisted:
 
They're all fucking bastards anyway.

On communicable (sic?) diseases: not so effective when population is greatly reduced and spread across large area. And seeing how there was the big germ scare in Fallout prior to the nuclear exchange, survivors were probably well-informed on quarantine techniques, burning buddies, I mean bodies, etc.
 
This has been discussed before in one of the interviews with someone from BIS, before they vated VanBeuren. although it is an interesting idea, too much realism kills, literally. Just think:
1 what the hell did the character eat? You didn't have to have food on you! Use of outdoorsman skill you say? How safe do you think those roasted rats were?
2. What kind of watter did he drink? He needed a relatively "clean" source, right? How about you travel around the map for a while, and when you enter a city/encounter/whatever you are surprised to find out that you glow in the dark? :lol:
3. If you were to get sick you would shurely die, especially if you were alone, or you could infest your companions and happily die together :twisted: .
How's that for a grimm perspective?
 
ApTyp hit the nail on the head. The main reason things like plague outbreaks occur in the first place is because there are gobs of hosts to spread it around. When you have large cities like NCR in Fallout 2 being around 3,000 people and all other towns being much smaller in population, there's not nearly as much chance of this kind of thing spreading. More people equates to more waste and garbage, and more waste and garbage attracts rats, more rats to carry fleas, and so on.
 
But what about within the vaults?

Obviously they're in an enclosed space for a long long long time, so germs would have a better chance of surviving and spreading througout a concentrated population like that. Assuming that there's at least one strain of germs or disease that survives the protocols set up to contain these sicknesses, that strain would most likely build up resistances and eventually become a super-disease.

Wouldn't it be possible in theory for a vault to be devasated by these scenario?
 
I don't think so, if there was a super-disease spreading amongst the vault dwellers population, the contaminated people could be isolated from the rest. The vault society seems to be pretty much to be as tight-ass as Vault City, so expect medical and psychological checks to make sure anybody hasn't either brought from the outside world or developed some kind of disease.

In an eventual outbreak scenario, I don't think there would be enough hosts for the germs to evolve, either, especially with all the fancy medical equipment the vaults were supposed to have, and the infected people already quarantined.
 
...

We're both talking about the same people who thought it'd be a good idea to send just one guy out with only a vault suit and PIPBoy to fix their water problem, right? :eyebrow:

The Vaults are sealed, therefore they wouldn't have any exposure to foreign contaminants, nor would they be expecting any. Yes, they would have good medical technology, but I still don't think that they would be able to prevent any and all breakouts from occuring. Germs can have a very high resistance to being eliminated.

No two people have the same cold germs, and that goes for any other sickness as well. Two people with the same sickness can display two different set of symptoms, which further hinders the process of finding and destorying any sicknesses.
 
The Vaults are sealed, therefore they wouldn't have any exposure to foreign contaminants
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Aye, but what about the germs that were brought in when the people moved to the vaults?

No two people have the same cold germs, and that goes for any other sickness as well. Two people with the same sickness can display two different set of symptoms, which further hinders the process of finding and destorying any sicknesses.
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If the vaults were effectively sealed and the people that moved in were "purified", then I doubt a dangerous virus would sprout from the void.

My point is that the disease cannot evolve that drastically in such a (relatively) small, "hygienic", well-fed and healthy population in such an amount of time, unless the virus/bacteria is a biological weapon. Not to mention (again) that infected people would be either quarantined or cast out of the vault.
 
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