Illness on Pandora?

[Ashen Key]

I came across something - and I really can't remember WHERE or what it was - that said that on Pandora, there are few (if any) illnesses and diseases on Pandora.

Can anyone else either confirm or deny this? If not, what are your thoughts?

For example, I can see the Na'vi refusal of the RDA's offer of medicine coming from two places - either they don't accept it because they believe in the will of Eywa, or they simply don't have the need like similar-level humans would.

EDIT: As clarification, I mean Pandoran illnesses for Pandoran life, not human diseases.

[Empty Glass]

I'm sure there's better examples than this, but I know that something of the sort was mentioned in Project 880:

It's not all grim here, he says. As of today you will never get another cold or flu. We don't get them here. Pandora has somehow reacted to the introduction of our viruses by creating a countervirus for each which wipes them out. In fact, the Consortium has the patents on these counterviruses, and when the FDA approves them, everybody on Earth will be buying them. That's the sort of thing we're looking for here. So please stay alert to the commercial possibilities of your research.

[Ashen Key]

Originally Posted by Empty Glass

I'm sure there's better examples than this, but I know that something of the sort was mentioned in Project 880:

Oh, I knew Eywa is getting rid of HUMAN illnesses - it makes sense, as part of her 'humans are awful and I want them GONE' thing. I was wondering about PANDORAN illnesses that would affect the Na'vi and other creatures.

[Empty Glass]

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying.

[Ashen Key]

Originally Posted by Empty Glass

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying.

My own fault! I didn't make it clear. I'll do so now.

[txen]

I just don't see how there would be no disease. There basically has to be. Weren't we told that Eywa only protects the balance of life? Bacteria and viruses are certainly part of the balance of life here. There is more bacterial biomass than any other kind. Advanced animals only make up a tiny percentage. I just can't come up with a scenario where this would not be the case on Pandora as well.

[Ashen Key]

Originally Posted by txen

I just don't see how there would be no disease. There basically has to be. Weren't we told that Eywa only protects the balance of life? Bacteria and viruses are certainly part of the balance of life here. There is more bacterial biomass than any other kind. Advanced animals only make up a tiny percentage. I just can't come up with a scenario where this would not be the case on Pandora as well.

That's basically my thought, too - although I think no disease could be fun to play with in the sense that maybe Pandora is ultimately unnatural. But I'm sure I read somewhere that the Na'vi suffer from few illnesses, so I'm just curious if there was anything supporting this.

[Human No More]

I'm fairly sure it was in the survival guide somewhere, or possibly in one of the sources on the design of the Na'vi.

[Fighter-of-Wars]

I'm sure there is. There pretty much has to be bacteria on Pandora for the system to work and if by some chance that bacteria gets into the body, it will probably wreak some havoc. As for viruses. I don't know. Pandora is very diverse and dangerous, I would be willing to assume that it has those as well. But what I wonder is the nature of them. Are there many types and they are mild or very few they they are very deadly. There has to be balance somewhere in there. But then again, who knows? It's an alien world.

[Human No More]

They are likely relatively few (conditions on Pandora are not perfect for disease transmission as they are on Earth), but the Na'vi immune system is also much stronger than the human one.

[Tsyal Makto]

Well, if we look at the lives of primitive hunter-gatherers, we find that they lived relatively disease-free lives. Their immune-systems were much stronger than those of modern humans, so while there might have been a stray bug here or there, the cause of most health problems was physical trauma.

I'd imagine it's the same on Pandora.

[Sothis]

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

Well, if we look at the lives of primitive hunter-gatherers, we find that they lived relatively disease-free lives. Their immune-systems were much stronger than those of modern humans, so while there might have been a stray bug here or there, the cause of most health problems was physical trauma.

...this is not true AT ALL. People used to die of things like the common cold all the time, and the rates of infant mortality considered "normal" would've been indication of some kind of horrible crisis if they were to occur today. There's a grain of truth in your last sentence, in that you'd be much more likely to die a violent death in many hunter-gatherer societies. So in that sense, you'd be less likely to die of disease... not because you are more immune, but because you are more likely to die some other way before you get the chance. Many of the leading causes of death today (heart disease, cancer, etc) have become leading causes because we are now living long enough to experience them in large numbers. Life expectancy used to be 30 - 40 years in many hunter-gatherer societies.

Also, you seem to have forgotten that it was disease - not violence - that was the most devastating killer of Native Americans when Europeans arrived on their continent.

[Ashen Key]

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

Well, if we look at the lives of primitive hunter-gatherers, we find that they lived relatively disease-free lives. Their immune-systems were much stronger than those of modern humans, so while there might have been a stray bug here or there, the cause of most health problems was physical trauma.

I'd imagine it's the same on Pandora.

Um, which...hunter-gatherers would those be, Tsyal? I've NEVER heard this. Yes, the Americas had fewer infectious diseases than Eurasia and Africa...but man, oh man, were/are the parasites nasty. Which is generally why Euroasians and Africans have developed better immunities against infectious diseases, and Native Americans against parasites (or so one of the current medical theories go, in effort to work out what doctors can do to protect the children of Native American descent from infectious disease.) But while some diseases did get transferred over from animals, which comes with farming and/or a nomadic lifestyle where you graze animals, not all of them did. In that case, it wasn't really to do with lifestyle in itself, but a combination of other factors, including plain luck of the draw. If the Americas had anything like the disease-pool that the Europeans had, we would have seen the Europeans dropping from strange disease, too. And we don't. The utter devastation caused in the Americas is also a combination of virgin soil epidemics AND genetics - Native Americans have a much smaller gene pool than Eurasians, so there were fewer chances for people to have a natural immunity scattered through the population like what happened in the so-called 'Old World'.

Also, in Africa, there were plenty of so-called 'primitive' hunter-gatherers for quite some time, including up to the present. And. I should mention, because it's a point that seems to be forgotten...only some Native Americans, on both continents, were hunter-gatherers. Others had farms. Yet others had empires. Just pointing that out.

(And in any case, a number of tribes in the Amazon - and lets face it, the rainforest on Pandora is very similar to the Amazon - have/had the belief that a child can have many fathers, not just the mother's husband. This is because if a large number of men feel like that are a child's father or part-father, they help support it, and thus children with many 'fathers' tend to survive more than children with one. Which again is related to checks and balances and population)

The note on ages I can't really comment on, as I don't know, but I would imagine that in cases where the adult population is mostly healthy, it's because the sick and weak ones have died as children and infants. There IS a reason why in a number of cultures, children weren't named until they were about a year old - just surviving until the age of one was impressive. Incidentally, I find myself not believing that thing about the land of grandparents - menopause is too well established as part of our species. The last few thousand years in Euroasia and Africa are not normal, as far as our species goes.

The thing is, trauma was one of the most common cause of death...in adults. Most children died before the age of two. Once you got into adulthood, usually you just had to worry about childbirth (women) or warfare or hunting (men). Well, usually - there were still colds and other infectious diseases, and lets not forget that something as simple as a broken bone can kill you... and speaking as a female, the childbirth statistics terrify me, so it's nothing to be sneezed at. Actually, as the Na'vi are bipedal, I would imagine that they have similar problems in childbirth that we do. Anyway, that's off-topic. Child mortality is repeated again and again and again. It's got nothing to do with the climate, except that the diseases will be different. What differs in climate is the food-supply, which is another kettle of fish (pun unintended).

Which is (to bring it all back on topic, so I don't continue the derailing. Sorry, guys!) a large reason why I was asking. I'm curious as to the checks and balances on Pandora for keeping the populations steady. In humans, it was (and in third world countries were immunization isn't as present, still is) mostly disease. I'm not talking plague, but common illnesses (and an EXCELLENT list can be found at here <-- this is the kind of thing I'm thinking about). But if the Na'vi DON'T have them...there has to be something else that is keeping them in check. I was actually surprised that there seemed to be so FEW Na'vi children seen in the movie - if the group that followed Jake was different to the one that ran to meet Grace, we're talking....maybe a dozen. And one of those was the young female hunter who joined Jake to get her Banshee. I'd really expect there to be more kids.

And yeah, Sothis, I'm pretty sure you are right there on the romanticizing nature and the joys of being "uncivilized", but I'm one of those annoying writers who tend to drag reality into things, along with poking things until they start to make sense *g*.

And like I said, if there AREN'T diseases, then that offers a whole other bunch of ideas of what is keeping the population under control. Such as Neytiri's comment of "Eywa keeps the balance of life" taken to logical extremes - She LITERALLY keeps the balancing by controlling the fertility of those who live on her (via the trees, I would imagine). Or other things as to how the Na'vi practice birth-control. But if there is no disease, there has to be something, and that's what I'm poking about.

[Sothis]

In response to Ash's question... of everything I've seen in the canon and pseudo-canon, the excerpt posted by Empty Glass is the one that most directly relates (note that I haven't read the entire survival's guide). Obviously, Project 880 is not canon, but it's an interesting concept and one that I've kept around in my personal canon. But even so, that only covers viruses... I haven't seen any mention of diseases caused by microorganisms, positively or negatively. So I guess it's left up to us for now. However, I do believe James Cameron has said that the Na'vi life expectancy is longer than the average human's, which is impressive given that modern humans' have nearly doubled in life expectancy since our own hunter-gatherer days, and the Na'vi STILL have us beat. So maybe that could point to a low prevalence of disease.

If so, this is the sort of thing that pushes Avatar into fantasy territory, making it less like science fiction and more like "Lord of the Rings." (Seriously, have you ever heard any mention of sick elves?) To me, it seems that the true engine of Avatar's appeal isn't our longing for nature per se... rather, it plays upon our longing for a mythic, romanticized version of nature -- nature as we want it to be rather than nature as it is. I think many people have an overly idealized vision of what "unspoiled," "uncivilized" nature is like. Yes, it's often beautiful, but it can also be nasty, cruel, uncaring, inexplicable, horribly uncomfortable, and really, really gross. (And this is coming from me, despite being a nature-lover all my life.)

[txen]

I don't want to turn this into a debate, but actually Sothis and Tysal Makto are sort of both right.

By far the largest improvement in life expectancy is the elimination of most causes of infant mortality. I don't know about hunter gathers, but if you look at life expectancy starting at 40 the results are kind of startling. In western societies that life expectancy has not increased all that much over the last few hundred years.

Another big factor is transportation. We move around a lot and can spread disease to the entire world in just a few days. Hundreds of years ago we did not move around nearly as much. An example might be the Hawaiian islands. When the first Polynesians reached the island they did not bring many viruses. They had no flu and for the most part no cold viruses either. It was in some ways a parallel of what we are talking about on Pandora.

They still had bacteria in Hawaii. Injuries got infected just as easily as anywhere else.