Several of my worlds have unique diseases and sicknesses, one being a major plot point in a scifi world. I have no experience with making diseases and I want them to sound interesting without pushing the bounds of believability.
Any advice is much appreciated.
Posted Sep 10, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC
You're a sci fi writer! Go wild! I don't think it would stretch the bounds of believability if you make a disease caused by nanobots releasing toxins into your blood or shooting your cell nuclei with radiation to cause a fast growing cancer!
Part of me wants to go wild, yet I like to think that given some circumstances these ideas could be believable, maybe in the far future but still.
A good place to start is: it's easily transmittable long before symptoms manifest...
Good to know, thanks.
As what defunctdeity basically said. I would suggest a disease that takes a decent time to actually show symptoms, but something that is highly contagious, even before symptoms appear. The faster it shows the 'scarier' it may appear, but the harder it would be to spread.
Thanks.
Well, i have a biochemistry degree. I can probably give you some pointers if you could define what role the plague plays in your setting.
The big one I want to make believable is the scifi story. Long story short at disease breaks out from an indeterminate source.
It imitates the flu while finding a place in the body to hide and mature. Once it does so the flu symptoms weaken, however 12 hours later this disease goes into overdrive. Almost every bodily fluid becomes contaminated while the disease works its way through the body.
(Scifi part) In the final stages of the disease it somehow works its way into the lungs and the air the patient expels contains trace amounts of contaminants. It then makes its way to the brain and leads to death.
I welcome any advice and criticism. Didn't expect to get an expert here!
Really virulent diseases don't kill quickly, or at least not early. Realiably killing your host is generally very bad for viruses. UNLESS you're sure to spread before you do it. Dead hosts are immobile hosts (and also can prevent the creation of future hosts). Viruses don't "want" to kill their hosts - that's not their "goal", they want to spread and to reproduce like any other lifeform, and to spread you need to travel. Dead hosts don't help (unless the death is too late). So how do you get that all to work in concert? Quick on-set, virulence, and deadly?
In a sci-fi setting, presumably the societies understanding of epidemiology is pretty advanced. This makes it even harder to be really virulent.
Other things to consider then, in addition to what I mentioned above, would be multi-species transmission points (maybe most species exhibit no symptoms?), long residence capabilities on inorganic "hosts" (door knobs, kitchenware), and even human carriers that exhibit no symptoms.
Also, I don't think the virus can be "in the air" the patient expels, it can be in the water they expel (though I think the water vapor in your breath is too small, so it's generally "large" droplets of things like coughs), and the mucus, and so on, but not strictly speaking the air. Too small (the air is).
Note: unlike may be the case in r/worldbuilding, 1 out of 6 of your "IRL" consumers will not be biochemists, so don't get too caught up in the viability of the biological premise(s), just harness the principles and use them as you need to! ;)
Thank you so much for your input! I'll start making changes and see how it evolves from here on.
Sounds good overall. In addition to the points the other answer already made, I have a bit of the problem with the brain infection. On the one hand, brain infections are comparatively rare, because there is a kind of filter between the blood and the brain, the blood-brain-barrier. So it doesn't lend itself to a widespread pandemic. On the other hand, such infections are usually devastating and hard to treat, because medications have a hard time passing into the brain, too.
As already said, your infection needs time to spread before it kills the hosts and burns itself out. So, for example Ebola kills extremely fast and doesn't spread well, so outbreaks tend to stay localized, while HIV spreads extremely well with its long symptom-free period, but kills almost too slowly to be a true population killer - too much time to find countermeasures and treatments. So you want to be somewhere in between, which is where the great pandemics of history also sat. Perhaps a week or two of incubation, where the carrier is asymptomatic but still spreads the infection.
All of the symptoms need to be beneficial to the plague/disease.
Most plagues have been transferred from Animals.
(Example:
Futuristic Plague liquefies humans.
Other than being cliche, what would be the cause of this happening?
The easiest answer is to spread via waterborne, but it can be anything.)
Didn't think of that, thanks.
As a few others said, if you want to up the scariness factor, if you can make it a Fungus.
If you have a dystopian world where this disease is very hard to notice and contain, and there's a "body pit" somewhere or quarantine, having the spores burst is pretty rad.
If this is a disease plaguing humans, you’ll probably want to go the fungus route. As Eukaryotes, they’re much harder to treat than bacteria or viruses. Although less contagious with more noticeable symptoms, if you want to go the route of “it’s killing everyone and we cant do anything about it”, shrooms are a decent way to set it up.
Didn't know that, definitely useful. Thanks!
If your world is in a sci fi setup, maybe associate the contamination or spread to your sci fi elements. Like hey we found a new energy that replaces electricity, but we found out 5 years later that when in contact with it our immune system is just a bit slower, allowing some diseases to thrive where they would before be eradicated before even being noticable.
New tech, new ways of travelling, new places. Anything with unforeseen consequences. But when the symptons manifest, it s already too late.
Other idea,one of the best ally of the virus to make it spread easier would be disinformation. Politics or scientist assuring it is safe while it is not.
Hope it is readable, not a native speaker.
So let's go back to some of the old flash games like Pandemic/Pandemic 2 (curse you, Madagascar!) and the newer Plague, Inc..
What are your vectors? Touch? Fluids? Aerosol? Contaminated food and water? Animal contact (fleas/rats, birds, pigs, mosquitoes, etc.)?
What are the symptoms?
What is the mechanism of death?
Is this a bacterium? Virus? Fungus? Prion? Something else?
I remember a plot point in The Andromeda Strain (early Michael Crichton, good book, good movie), where one of the scientists was wondering if the disease itself needed to be treated or just the symptoms--like a disease that has severe, continuous diarrhea will kill mostly through dehydration. If you can beat the deydration symptom, the body fights the disease off on its own.
For that matter, look at the symptoms from The Andromeda Strain!
Also you're in sci-fi, and sci-fi readers already will allow the bounds of believability to be expanded much farther than most.
Thanks for all of the information!