@Strandjunker I don't think highly contagious diseases like that are common in the modern world. You might be thinking of leprosy (which is actually far less contagious than it used to be thought of, it just has a long incubation period, so early attempts at contact tracing yielded scary confusing results). The Pumpkinrot is most likely either cancerous or some combination of poorly treated diabetes and senescence; infectious cancers are rare in vivo[1] and while the possibility of infectious diabetes is complicated, if it can transfer from human to human, its incubation period is probably much longer than leprosy's.

[1] Strangely, there's a very famous in vitro case, the single-celled vertebrate lifeform called Helacyton gartleri. But as for in vivo transmissible cancers, there are very few. I think only two human-to-human ones have been reported (not counting carcinogenic viruses such as HPV), one tapeworm-to-human one, a nasty one killing Tasmanian devils right now, the ancient Canine Transmissible Veneral Cancer, and potentially a couple of marine ones that are yet to be understood and whose very existences are still being debated. The Sea Star Wasting Disease, for which transmissible cancer was once suspected, has now been traced to a bacterium, a substrain of Vibrio pectenicida, for example.

@Strandjunker You mean other than the antibiotic resistant gonorrhea?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1HCWSYHnao

@Strandjunker

😞