>>35818520It is somewhat complicated because there are multiple factors influencing how deadly a hypothetical STD epidemic would be for /risu/, although in short it would not be a good time for them in most cases.
It should be noted that for the aboriginal population, the mortality rate of most infectious diseases is generally not too much higher than for the Europeans - using 16th century Mexico as an example, the smallpox epidemic killed about a third of the natives, which is fairly similar to the mortality rate of ordinary smallpox (other types of it is *much* deadlier although they are also rarer). The main outliner that I can tell is the cocoliztli epidemic (we don't exactly know what caused the cocoliztli, although recent research suggested that it might be salmonella, which was normally much less deadly), which did end up killing almost two-third of Mexico's native population (both of them together ended up killing 90% of the native population in the span of less than a century).
The main reason why it ended up much more devastating than in Europe is that while the Old World has more or less learnt to live with many of these pathogens (people are constantly infected, and either died or recovered with varying degree of immunity) for millennia, New World population had never encountered them before, which led to a significant chunk of the population getting infected within a short period of time. As such, the effect became much more significant due to all the death happening at the same time - a European example would be the Black Death, and many of us are fairly familiar with how devastating it was.
Another aggravating factor was that the colonisers were... not exactly the best caretakers of the native population, to put it mildly. Systematic mistreatment, if not outright eradication of the native population, as well as the collapse of their existing society, likely made the epidemics much deadlier for them as they did not have as many resources and systems in place to mitigate its effects, which in turns likely caused further devastation as it was common in agricultural societies.
So where does that leave /risu/? On one hand, /risu/ is not a colony, and its existing government system (especially if supernatural means of prevention and remedy are involved) should serve as mitigating factors to the death rate. On the other hand, /risu/'s promiscuity would mean any STD that managed to infect them would spread like wildfire which could be comparable to how aborigines got infected en masse with Old World diseases. Considering that STDs can infect people through non-sexual means (usually by coming into contact with infectious bodily fluids), it is probably safe to say that epidemic would reach most of the population in a relatively short time.
One saving grace for /risu/ is that diseases that infectious, including most STDs known, tend to have a relatively low mortality rate. However, they could nonetheless leave debilitating symptoms in the survivors (although they might become immune or very resistant against future infections) - I suppose neurosyphillis could explain some risuners'... manners. Still, most real life STDs should not necessarily be society-collapsing for them, especially if they have superior prevention, quarantine and treatment methods. Granted, they can simply say they are immune to STDs somehow (this world is fictional after all), but I don't know if that has any real life examples that could show how it would happen.
