OK... you can certainly do that. But I have to ask: why?

If you don't know what the words mean, what possible difference does it make which words are used? As far a I can tell, the fact that a virus is called a "strain of HMHVV" means something only to people who have backgrounds in biological sciences and medicine. To people who lack such a background it could just as eaily be called "vampirism syndrome" or "Krieger's Disease" and that would be just as "medical sounding", right?

I'm going to compare this directly to the grenades of previous editions: something that really bothered some people with a military background. See apparently an offensive grenade is designed to be used in close combat or against bunkers and has a small blast radius and a defensive grenade is deisgned to be thrown from a fox-hole or bunker into an open area and has a large blast radius.

I'm not a military person, but I could see how people who actually knew that sort of thing might get pissed off when the old SR books listed "offensive greandes" with a big blast radius and "defensive grenades" with a small blast radius. That backwards terminology would be really grating to people who had the slightest idea what those words meant. And indeed, that was fixed in SR4 by simply switching to the terminology of "Fragmentation Grenades" and "High Explosive Grenades" in order to simply move past that particular error without really rubbing it in the face of anyone who didn't know or didn't care what those words actually meant (like me).

Was there a backlash against fixing grenade terminology? Why would there be a backlash against virus terminology upgrading?

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Whenever people pay for the killing of other people, there's a reason for it. When people were paying cash for the scalps of Indians, it was because they were attempting to get the land that they lived on for their own people. When people paid money for turning over Jews it was because they wanted to maintain an economic model with very low taxation for the majority on the backbone of looting the remaining people. When money was paid for killing blacks who weren't enslaved it was because they wanted to keep the remaining slaves terrorized and in-line.

There's almost always a monetary motive in addition to hatred and fear.

So while Ghouls can and do invoke a noticable amount of hatred and fear both justified and irrational, it is unlikely that anyone would be willing to offer a bounty on their elimination for that reason alone. After all, the flesh demands of Ghouls (about one human body's worth in 22 months) are so modest that they pose no significant threat to human kind so long as less than 2.3% of the population (assuming that humans live an average of 80 years by 2071), and the true percentages fall short of that by a multiple of a hundred.

So where does the monetary incentive come from? It could potentially be property values - except that the Shadowrun world has Sacrifice Zones and Barrens. With fuel prices high and magical movement being available for small numbers of very large transports, the entire horizontal city concept of the early 20th century is out the window. Indeed, the motion of the day is for Arcologies - which don't require or care about property values. So much so that the big players would just assume that the areas outside the arcologies were full of man-eating monstersto drive people to the core where it is easier t deliver goods and services to them.

And it really doesn't seem to fit the expropriation of the Jews and Romany as a model either, because Ghouls don't really have anything that you want.

And it's hard to buy it as a religious statement defending the position of religion as the safeguarder of corpses and the afterlife because in Shadowrun the major religions are on the way out and the Shedim menace has forced people to pretty much abandon the fetishizing of corpse preservation anyway.

So seriously, where does it come from? Possibly as a method of control - where in if a tiny minority that has a difficult time articulating its demands is sufficiently demonized and hunted it could be used as leverage against the rest of the population. That's about the only argument I can really buy.

In which case, you'd be getting the bounty from public relations firms working for the local police contractors. They would then publicize the destruction of the ghouls in public advisories about how flesh eating predators were prowling the streets and the police needed more funding and ordnance to protect your children from being eaten by canibalistic monsters...

-Frank