Less Deadly Childhood Measles
Measles in base game gives a health penalty of -3 for everyone and an additional -3 for children, which is a total of -6 health. For comparison this -6 is the same penalty as for smallpox in elderly people and is greater than the health penalty for typhus or bloody flux in the elderly (-5.5).Bubonic plague is -7 health (and an additional -2 health for elderly characters). Given the real world mortality rate of untreated bubonic plague is 50% and smallpox is 30%, and measles usually has a much lower fatality rate than smallpox (usually no more than 15% and often significantly lower), childhood measles having the same health penalty as childhood smallpox (-4.5) seems reasonable. Children should still die of measles with this change, particularly if they are sickly, but it should no longer wipe out every single one of a character’s children.
In order to be truly accurate to history measles out to be an endemic disease that almost everyone gets at some point in childhood, and not an epidemic that ravages the population then dies down. It also appears that the "Child Health Penalty" applies to all characters under 16, and every character who recovers from measles has a 5% chance of becoming blind, which is not realistic as most death and neurological damage from measles occurs in children under 5 years of age. But addressing these issues is beyond the scope of this mod.
Skull icon by POD Gladiator
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Arrow icon by hqrloveq
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