So, I'd missed Jonah Hex in the movies, but watched it on DVD yesterday. Even though Megan Fox was playing the prostitute, every time someone went into her room I thought, "Eww, gross!", because as far as prostitutes that I know are concerned, they're all sort of gross.

Then I got to thinking about how you'd protray veneral disease in a historical setting like that. The thing that many people don't seem to realize about veneral disease is that it's often, especially in women, asymptomatic. That means that in the days before microscopy and PCRs and stuff like that, and certainly before germ theory, probably there were lots of people running around with veneral disease who did not know, and who had no way of knowing at the time, that they were sick and/or contagious. Pre germ theory, you could spend all day looking at someone's genitals at high noon with a magnifying glass, and you'd literally have no way of knowing for sure, or even conceptualizing realistically, whether or not a biohazard was contained therein. And before you had the ability to do lab work on samples, most people probably assumed that if something looked totally normal that it was free of disease. Think that as recently as in Victorian times you wouldn't strictly speaking be able to tell if someone's genitals were safe or not. Even today, come to think of it, many tests for infectious disease have a window period of around 3 months at least.

Syphilis is of particular note because there was a historical epidemic of syphilis in Western Europe in the 1500s, and also because in the context of a role playing game syphilis would be the most complicated to portray in a character and could also be part of character development, if it eventually causes neurological problems. As an example, my understanding is that Nietzche got syphilis and his neurological damage explained how his writings became stranger and stranger towards the end of his life.

If someone wanted to run some kind of prostitute character in a Western setting, that character could have syphillis but be asymptomatic and not know it. As the campaign progressed, the character could start to develop dementia and deformity. For someone who is interested in character progression and storytelling, that could be a really interesting character to portray.

Anyway, here's the wikipedia article on syphilis; it's pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphillis

mmmm Megan Fox. saw her in jenifer's body. that lesbian scene. hot hot hot! "excuse me ladies, may I join in?"

I think the real question is, what diseases are common in 2055, what are the symptoms, and in the age of post-antibiotics, which are treatable? (I assume that overprescription of antibiotics in the 20th century has successfully created a number of antibiotic resistant bugs, which are now the dominate forms of those diseases, and any other treatment is only available to the super-wealthy.)

Antibiotic resistance could return us effectively to a pre-antibiotic era if it gets too out of hand. It is a very serious issue, especially in the area of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis used to be within the top 5 causes of death in the US. Virtually every young man who had survived a gas attack in World War I later died of tuberculosis. In the US, people used to have to be taken away from their families if they were contagious, and the only thing you could do to try and treat them was give them plenty of sunlight and feed them eggs and salmon to try and use vitamin D to improve cell mediated immunity to TB.

The situation was almost under control with the advent of antibiotics, but for various reasons we're seeing drug resistant strains of TB emerge, including TB that's immune to all or most of the antibiotics that are used to treat it. There is a lot of this in Eastern Europe. There's a lot of reasons for this, including budget cuts in the 80s, and problems with drug supply in developing countries, and people not following damn directions and thinking that doing what they want at any given moment is more important than the future of the world in terms of whether or not there will be drug resistant strains of airborne disease floating around in the air.

Nezumi, for me, the big kicker about lots of disease is that a lot of it will be asymptomatic for a long time. Symptoms usually become obvious when the illness is quite advanced and the person would have been contagious possibly for months, before the person knows that something is seriously wrong. This is true especially of people who don't take care of their health and who are used to feeling sick and grotty a lot. They don't know that something special is wrong until things have gotten quite bad. I've also had to deal with people whose health was at great risk, but they did not care about it at all. They would not take any steps towards diagnosis or treatment.

I would think that if you had a hypothetical shadowrunner he or she would be a lot like that. Let's say that Joe Shadowrunner had XDR tuberculosis. (XDR meaning extensively drug resistant, so for the purpose of our example it's resistant to most or all of the medicines available that would be used to treat it.) He could be contagious via airborne route and have infectious sputum in his lungs, but if he felt a little tired and had a little bit of a cough he would probably ignore it and attribute it to this ridiculously unhealthy lifestyle. He wouldn't even notice it until he got so weak that he was collapsing on the job, coughing up blood, etc. At that point he would probably be crippled due to lung damage as well, not being able to run around or even walk too far without resting depending on how bad it was. In the world of SR he could probably get a cyberlung or something, but today that would be a lifelong crippling injury. So, all the while, he's been exposing anyone who spends a lot of time indoors with him to the same bacteria and it would be the same story with them in terms of it taking a long time before real obvious symptoms develop.

Any sort of cure for TB disease requires taking daily doses of medicine for 6-9 months. People will feel better long before that time period has passed, and so one of the reasons that we have drug resistant TB today is that lots of people felt better and then decided to stop taking the meds, which often have side affects. So we could easily see Joe Shadowrunner creating drug resistance by not doing the treatment right even if he did seek treatment. If he has to go into hiding for a while unexpectedly that could interrupt his drug supply. If the drugs he get have not been properly refrigerated at some point in time he could effectively be missing doses without knowing it. So worst case scenario he feels better but later gets sick again but this time the organism is even more drug resistant. Then the lung damage forces him to retire, or something like that, assuming he can't afford a new lung or whatever. (Actually, surgeons will not operate on someone with TB disease, because by cutting someone open with that organism in their body, the surgeon and his crew would get a huge dose of the bacteria in the air. So if street docs knew that the runner had TB especially improperly treated TB, maybe none of them would agree to perform the operation.)

I speculate that in a similar vein if Joe Shadowrunner were shot through the lung on a mission the exit wound/gore spray could areosolize a lot of the bacteria and his team mates could get a huge dose of bacteria greatly in excesss of what comes out normally through the nose and mouth. Enormous doses of TB are associated with high probabilities of infection and rapid progression to severe disease. So his whole team could be jacked by being in his lung gore spray and breathing some of that in, or even getting bits of sputum and chunks of lungs into cuts and mucus membranes.

My point of going into all this is to give you an idea of the myriad ways on how disease could totally jack up someone who runs around acting like a shadowrunner and the kinds of supply issues that would come up with medical treatments for someone in that lifestyle as well.

And we're not even getting into bloodborne pathogens...

If the 'Runner is poor he's hosed, but the existence of the Valkyrie Module for telesurgery means that surgeon self-protection doesn't need to be a barrier to surgery.

~J

True, if he had lots of money, and the right connections whereby he could set something like that up to be done for him, he could get a new lung. However, that wouldn't be a long term solution until he also was able to kill off all the bacteria in his body. If he still had TB in his system it could just come back and ruin his new lung eventually, assuming it's not some bacteria-proof metal cyberlung or something.

EDIT: If he didn't take care of the bacteria it could also travel to other parts of his body, including brain and nervous system, and continue to cause life threatening conditions for him.

I've got a runner who is doing this right now, with Kreuger strain of HMHVV. He's too busy running around to take his meds, so he takes enough to prevent irreversible damage, and gets back on the road.

See, the first thing that popped in my mind when I read your post was that the character would be creating a drug resistant strain by doing that.