> On Aug 31, 2016, at 11:19 AM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
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> Apparently the 'bulk mass' of Vilani was still considered a problem by the 'canon-writers' so they came up w/ a plague that decimated the Vilani pop in the Rimward areas of the V’Imperium.

IIRC the ‘canon-writers' named it: the flu.

Vilani (and all non-terran Humanti) had evolved on worlds without pathogens common to Terra. The Traveller authors got their plague the same place Wells got his for "War of the Worlds”…what happened when Europeans contacted the New World; for example *low* estimates make it that 90% of the Meso and South American human population was wiped out between 1492 and 1650, mostly to disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas

Now, given what we know (and what most of Trav’s authors did not) there would have certainly been diseases that went the other way, because viruses and bacteria are decidedly fast little evolvers and would have found ways to colonize even ‘alien’ species like the Vilani. So the canonical fact that the Vilani had few diseases to contend with would have been wrong. At the very least they would have had whatever evolved out of their gut flora...

 By the time of the Terran takeover, there certainly would have been diseases that Terrans had no immunity to, as well. This, too was seen in real life. The first Europeans to visit the New World brought back disease for which they had no immunity either, like syphilis, which progressed and killed much faster back then that it does today.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs