Making a lethal, hard to cure virus?
Basically, my current thought process is to have a virus that causes one to all vital organs to fail upon reacting to its components. It has to make contact with as many people as possible, therefore has to be airborne.
The virus itself would be slow-acting, and can, for example, take longer to cure than it takes to kill, or be extremely hard to detect with countless variants.
What I have so far is:
- A pathogen resembling a normal human cell in both behavior and characteristics, making it hard to detect.
- Bolstering its heat and cold resistance enough that killing it by heating or freezing it would result in killing the host as well. (Giving it general resistances to most common decontamination methods, basically.)
- Making its hosts vitality vary by individuals, although surviving without taking countermeasures is impossible.
I believe some pseudo-science can lead to such results, although my problem lies in its spreading. If it's hard to detect in a human body, then it would be relatively easy to find while travelling by air or water, wouldn't it? And spreading it by body contact is somewhat inefficient, since it would take a long time for it to spread everywhere, and I want its transmission to be as fast as possible.
What I want to know is:
Are there elements that can attach themselves to oxygen molecules and remain undetectable? If not, then what would a "scientific" approach to making one be?
What kind of lethal elements to the human body are there that could result in organ failure upon contact, and / or cause visible effects?
Are there any air filtering methods that can cleanse oxygen molecules enough that such a pathogen would be removed?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/79889. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
A possible way to have the virus spread quickly yet be deadly is to have a double effect. Shortly after infection, it basically acts like the common cold. The common cold spreads quite effectively every winter, but is neither feared much nor do people take too strict measures to avoid it. So if in the short time frame, your virus is effectively indistinguishable from the common cold, it should have no trouble spreading.
As the next step, it would take a strategy from the herpes virus: The herpes virus can hide for an extended time in nerves, invisible to the immune system, and not showing any symptoms, until it "wakes up" and gives symptoms again. Your virus could do the same after the initial common-cold effects. This dormant phase would make it harder to connect the activity after "waking up" to the previous infection, especially given the distinct symptoms (see below). I think about three months should be enough to obscure the connection.
In the third step, after waking up it would no longer be harmless. Since it is already hiding in nerves, those would also be the obvious point of attack. Basically it could cause the nerves to stop working. A failure of the nervous system would certainly be deadly. If it doesn't come with other symptoms (especially without release of new virus particles), it would probably be hard to find a connection to the seemingly harmless virus.
Of course after some time, someone will notice that those dying from that mysterious nerve failure syndrome all had an apparent common cold three months earlier. But at that time, many will already have been infected, and with the viruses hiding in the nerves, treatment will be hard, if not impossible. But of course there will be an attempt to at least prevent new infections. But here the virus could implement a strategy known from influenza and HIV: It could mutate its structure frequently. That makes it hard to develop vaccines against it, as any vaccine will only protect against the mutations it was developed from.
As additional infection vector, it might also infect animals, however without those animals showing the deadly symptoms, so it goes unnoticed in farm animals which then get slaughtered normally. If the virus then survives cooking, eating meat could be an additional vector for infection. That would also make it harder to find the connection, because the meat-infected humans would get the nervous system breakdown without a previous apparent common cold,as the virus in the animals would already be beyond that phase when the meat is eaten. Thus would cast doubt on the connection between apparent common cold and nervous system breakdown, and therefore delay understanding, and thus fighting, that illness.
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