Posts tagged diseases
The Black Death, which claimed an estimated 75-100 million lives, was one of the most devastating events that is still well known today. What conditions would allow the plague to spread and kill ...
I have an idea for a short SF story, where an alien race infects a tiny village with a virus, which eventually spreads to entire Earth. And I need to know what minimum time is required to infect th...
Ignorance is curable, living is forever. Robert A. Heinlein1 Cutting to the hard data: Due to some or another reason2 the genetic information stored inside cells (aka DNA) of my Immortals d...
A common trope in zombie mediums in to base the virus off of rabies. While this choice does have some obvious reasoning to it, it has been long over done. Relatively recently, The Last of Us came o...
Would it be possible that other planets, or even other random celestial bodies, contain different types of pathogens? According to Wikipedia, the known types of pathogens are: virus, bacterium, pri...
The orcs in my world are humans who have been infected by two different diseases: An airborne mutagen that permanently denatures their myostatin receptors, which prevents their muscles from being...
I did some quick research on DNA and I know it can be damaged by different sorts of mutagens. I also know that this kind of damage can lead to cancer. Though I'm not entirely sure of where exactly ...
I won't claim to be a biologist, but I'm fairly certain that it's really hard for disease to survive in space because most bacteria and viruses need a host in order to survive for long periods of t...
By using antibiotics too frequently, some argue, we're setting the world up for a pandemic that we cannot treat. Every time an antibiotic substance is used, the bacteria that survive reproduce. Ev...
In the future, AI systems sanitize humans as they walk through doorways. Home surfaces self-sanitize. Food is mostly 3D printed from cleaned particles, including Vitamin K and possibly some probiot...
Would it be possible for a virus to extend the average human life-span (but only by about 50-70 years max) if the infected people kept it controlled enough where it wouldn't (alternatively) kill th...
This is a rather nasty, if rare, brain-eating thermophilic amoeba which lives in warm waters in North America (and elsewhere?). It kills by infecting the brain via the olfactory nerve after it ente...
A common thing we see in zombie movies in the ability to remove the infected area (usually the arm or leg) despite the fact that a blood borne illness would travel throughout the body. How could I ...
Building on Josh King's answer to this question concerning the feasibility of a disease which dies with its host, can a disease be contagious by airborne means while not being contagious by fluid e...
How believable is a touch or fluid vectored bacteria which is so dependent on its host that the remains of a terminated victim become non-contageous within minutes of the host's death? I'm postula...
What I mean to say is that the Black Death of the 14th century still devastated Europe, but the culprit in this alternate scenario is not Yersinia pestis, the bacterium believed to be responsible f...
I'd like to send my protagonist permanently into the near-ish future. I suspect that something as simple as the common cold could be deadly to my protagonist once we get a little further along. I...
"One other thing. Never drink the water out here without boiling it." the old scavenger added, waving a hand over the bogs and hills. "You'll get rabies, and I don't like accepting payment from ...
The leprechaun. A little ginger humanoid dressed in green, with buckled shoes and a matching hat, and a massive pot of (tax-free) gold. We all know them. Or not. For the world I'm building, I've d...
Lets say you have a small group of space colonists. They were screened for sickness, viral and bacterial, as thoroughly as we knew how before being sent off to the colony and all were found health...
Pretty much what it says on the tin: It's the beginning of 2016. Due to a fast-spreading virus, humans have lost the ability to reproduce themselves. The virus makes current artifical fertiliza...
The government of Futurestan has finally decided to hear the voice of her people. It would seem that the protriotors access to malware, EMP-otovs, and weaponized angry glaring (and thermite. Lots o...
Running a Steampunk campaign with some friends. The idea is that a massive a destructive plague wiped out the population of an island that was really technologically advanced. The plague needs to s...
We all know about how the aliens in War of the Worlds were killed by the common cold, but how susceptible would aliens really be to human diseases? In my story, I have an alien species living amo...
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