Worldbuilding 102: Illnesses and Diseases
Hello and welcome back to my blog! Your favourite alien Limax, Vivian, is here to entertain and educate! But first, due to the content, a disclaimer:
Disclaimer: Within this blog I will bring up certain things that have historically been considered scientifically diseases. This is a view that many bigots and hateful people retain to this day, and I am in no way supporting their side. I condemn such views and will not tolerate in the comments below any form of bigotry toward any group. These mentions are for historical accuracy and what can be done in societies to make them more realistic and flawed but are in no way reflecting reality, nor scientific consensus, nor my personal opinion.
There, done, you understand? Gay is fine and okay, we’re onboard on this? If not, please leave my blog.
What is a disease?
There are plenty of things we call diseases in everyday speech because we view them negatively in many ways socially, personally and more but in scientific circles, there are a strict set of criteria that is necessary for something to be considered a disease or illness.
Causes an abnormality to one or more of the functions of the body.
Affects the organism in a negative way.
Is not the result of an injury.
Clear as day huh? …Yeah, you knew I was going to raise the issues. First of all, what constitutes abnormality? I am autistic, and to me, autism is normal, and what the vast majority of you experience is abnormal. Do we use statistics? Is “normal” what 75% of the population has? Two Standard deviations on a normal curve? There are a lot of fluid cases on this point alone, and this has caused lots of issues historically and to this day.
Second, what is negative? What you consider a negative effect, I might think is positive. Just to go to myself. A lot of people would feel that my harder time learning social skills growing up is a negative. A lot of the time back then, I would have even agreed, but these days when I am an adult and see with hindsight, I greatly appreciate my experiences and struggles with social interactions. They have given me a different perspective on human interactions and a different way to think about things that actually contribute to my job, my writing, and my worldbuilding. Is that positive or negative then? It is a judgement call for people to make, and it can go real south, especially when you think about people from different times, generally hateful people, or pure bigots.
And finally injury. That one is at least clear? Well, mostly. It can be defined as physical harm to the body, but even there it can get hard. But this one, let’s skip it.
Why did I spell out all these issues? We just KNOW what an illness/disease is, right? Well no, scientists and doctors and more are still trying to figure it out, and for some people, it is extremely sensitive. My autism is definitely something where I do not think I am ill or such, and it’d feel bad for me if someone said it was that. We have a lot of this shit thrown at the queer community to this day. Being queer has throughout history in many different parts of the world been considered a form of illness. Interestingly, this has not always been all queerness. There are a few documented cases where non-binary-like and trans-like ideas have been culturally accepted, though we should also understand that they would not use such words, terminology, nor understand it the way we do today, so do not think their concept in the past is identical to our concept in modern times. Fortunately, most of modern academia is catching up, and while it still has some ways to go based on conversations with friends (I wonder who?) who still face discrimination, a lot of bad people in the general population aren't interested in changing their views.
An old belief that has progressed is homosexuality. It was considered an illness on the basis that it was abnormal (how are they going to have kids?), and it really is a negative (they cannot have kids). I am simplifying a bit, but it captures the general gist. For anyone who is homosexual, we have the argument I gave above about autism. What others see as a negative, they don’t necessarily agree and might even like it. I certainly don’t consider those things abnormal nor negative.
So I have been rambling a bit here and taken two classical historical examples of it being totally wrong: why? Because these kinds of things illuminate the values of your society: what they think is normal, what they think is negative, and so on. By framing things we might not consider diseases/illnesses as such in a culture, you can, in writing and worldbuilding, display what we would consider moral flaws and faults of the society at large. It can even work as a way to give protags and more a journey and point of growth. Just remember that the framing is the society, not you as the maker. Well, unless you are a piece of shit person that has little respect for other people.
A fictional example is the Moclans from The Orville. I have a lot of gripes with the show’s worldbuilding and especially this species, but in this case, they work by showing how a culture's view of what is “good” and “normal” affects what is considered a disease. If you wish to learn how, watch the show–it is worth a watch.
Disease types
When it comes to diseases, there are many subcategories that can be made. Causes, effects, symptoms, and many other factors. For the sake of worldbuilding, I am going to focus mostly on divisions based on the cause of said illness. I will also not focus on how the immune system or the likes would respond.
Bacterial
We think of them as small and insignificant, but they are coming back with a vengeance!
(Credit: Kurzgesagt youtube channel)
I’ll explain how soon. But what is a bacteria? They are part of the large family called prokaryotes; the word means essentially “Before the cell nucleus”. There are further subdivisions, but for the sake of understanding them here, all you need to know is that bacteria are generally much simpler than eukaryotic cells (those we have, meaning “After the nucleus”). They don’t have a nucleus and lack a lot of the cellular structure we have, and use different ones. They are still as capable as us! Just different. This is one way you can increase disease variables, actually: use different structures to the cells, thus giving a wider range of options (I’ll go into this later, and probably a blog post of its own).
Bacteria can be helpful and damaging; we won’t focus on the helpful ones as this is not the blog for it. Instead, the bad ones. They, like all living things, want to reproduce and get energy. It just so happens that the person in question is the food source. If a person is lucky so that by evolutionary forces and the lifestyle of the bacteria, a dead host is a bad host, the bacteria will naturally evolve to NOT kill the host. However, if the host being alive becomes a void issue to the procreation of the bacteria, death is likely imminent as it has no incentive not to destroy everything and extract as much as it can from the host.
A common theme for bacteria is that they produce toxins that damage our cells and can destroy and kill them. Much easier eating the remains of a cell than a functional living cell itself, after all! But bacteria can work in many many different ways, so you can be creative. Like many times before, I advise that if you want it to be bacteria that you imagine, how does the bacteria actually harm the body? Do this just so you can get a feel, a sense, of how it works, and thus what symptoms would naturally arise and what cures might work. For example, one common bacteria is Chlamydia trachomatis. Wanna take a guess which disease it causes? We’ve all heard the symptoms. They differ between the sexes; use safety precautions for fuck’s sake!
Why are they coming back with a vengeance? To spoil a section below, it’s because they are evolving to become increasingly more resistant to our treatments. After all, they are living things like us, and they undergo evolution and try to survive! Antibiotics are great, but your overuse is finally coming back to bite you.
Viral
Viruses are interesting, besides the age old question of why is it octopus - octopi but not virus - viri? But I digress. Mouse, mice, House, hice, you do you English. Anyway, viruses are in a sense halfway between living and dead. They are not dead because they clearly can reproduce and do quite a few living activities. But they are not quite living either because without other cells to parasitise, they would be unable to do anything. So half-alive they are… are they the real zombies? 🤔
Viruses universally work on the premise that they infect a cell, hijack its machinery, and force it to produce more viruses before the cell explodes and releases the newly produced viruses, sending them out to infect more cells and repeat the cycle indefinitely. This of course makes viruses interesting in a way in terms of illnesses. While bacteria can in many ways survive without the host, thus lacking incentive to kill sometimes (I am anthropomorphising here for the sake of brevity), viruses cannot kill their host because then there is nothing left to infect. At the same time, they absolutely have to cause damage to do anything that they want.
This is one reason why viral diseases over time generally develop to become non-lethal. They do enough damage that they can do their job but not so much that they terminate the organism they depend on. FIV, the feline version of HIV, is a perfect example of this. Most cat animals are completely unaffected by it, and their immune system works fine because the virus and the felines have co-evolved into a state where the virus can do its thing without harming the felines. The reason why HIV has not is because, as it is thought, it is only about 150 years old while FIV is much older. Viruses that go “wrong”, as in, it is not in the host that they have evolved for and thus “expect” to be in, can quickly turn lethal because what is easy for one species to shrug off can be devastating to another… Covid-19, anyone?
With viruses, you can be quite liberal with the symptoms and effects due to them literally affecting the cellular functions and even the genetics of a cell. I have used these to create a “Cure” (more like help) to radiation damage and even help against cancer in my world. I might go into it later in the post! Read to find out!
Fungal
This one is interesting in many ways because, as I said in my post on alien biologies, fungi are heterotrophic. It means they have to eat and consume other living beings like animals. Please use that post to make new kingdoms, and you can expand the possible categories of diseases exponentially!
Anyway, what this means is that the most common fungal infections are rather harmless: they grow on you, dig in, extract some nutrients from you, then generally continue on being a nuisance or dying once the life cycle is done. But this is not the only way fungi can and do operate. When it comes to more, how should I phrase this… primitive brains than humans, they can be exceedingly insidious. Some fungi are known to turn ants into zombies by pumping them full of hormones so the ant goes up high, dies, and then the fungi “bloom” and release more of themselves onto other ants to repeat the cycle.
There is another that infects flies, and it doesn’t just try to fuck with the fly’s brain with hormones, it actively release cells into the body of the fly that then get to the brain and starts fiddling with it. Imagine if this happened to you? Terrifying! Last of Us, GTFO! There are some fungi that also do a more hands on approach, and rather than fuck with the brain, grow around muscles and stuff they want to control and, when the time is right, force muscles and more to do what they want, whether or not the brain commands it. We are getting into real nightmare territory here.
There is yet another for Cicadas that… just wow if you ask me. Imagine like your butt fell off and the fungus has grown fuzzy stuff there that makes you super attractive to others so they start dry humping you because of hormonal highs due to pheromones that then repeat the cycle. Seriously, the males start behaving like females and smell like females for others to start humping them. It is mad.
Okay, fungi are nightmare material, you get it, and my point is, you can use this in fungi or quite honestly ANY kingdom as long as they are seemingly close enough. Close enough in what sense? Evolutionary mostly: the longer the distance in time from their most recent common ancestor, the harder it is, but you know. There is nothing that time cannot fix.
Fungi in this example do seem to struggle to deal with more complicated brains, as there are no recorded examples of them having these drastic effects in vertebrates. It might be the immune system itself (given the immune system of arthropods and vertebrates are very different) or the way the brains work, so there might be limitations it cannot cross… but fiction can go “Fuck that”... fuck you, Last of Us!
Mental
This is a very sensitive topic, and to some degree it is a bit personal as well. As I have stated, I have autism, or am autistic, depending on your choice of wording. I have also had a few spots of depression in life, but it was undiagnosed at the time, so I will not say it was 100% so but… my thoughts were dark back then. Luckily, here I am!
What can I say about these “illnesses”, then? As a general rule of thumb, if you wish to do actual ones and you do not know how it is to have the thing, or it is so long ago you cannot remotely relate to it anymore, there is only one thing I can say. Well, 3 important pieces of advice: research, research, research! You need to do a lot of research to appropriately depict actual mental health issues. The best thing you can do is find an actual person that either recently or is still going through something and talk with them about their life experiences. Heck, you can even ask them how they would react to fictional things you wish to make in your story and use it as inspiration. (If anyone wishes to do autism related characters or plots, feel free to hit me up, and we can chat!) But for all mental health issues, show them the respect they deserve. It has been stigmatised a lot. Society is still trying to figure out a lot of things when it comes to mental health and illnesses, or even whether it is an illness at all, and it is in a state of constant flux. Showing respect and acknowledging that these are people who are going through this is important.
If you wish to invent fictional mental health issues, remember the conditions described at the beginning of this post for them to be classified and use those to make one that is entirely fictional. You can use inspiration from pre-existing ones if you so want, but if you lean too much into one, see previous paragraph on what to do. Even here, you should treat it with a level of respect.
Do not make it whimsical and needlessly entertaining. Is my autism entertaining to people sometimes? Yes, but it is because at those times I chose to lean into it and make myself the butt of jokes, and I have given consent to my colleagues and friends that they can make jokes about it. But it is my choice to allow people and myself to joke about it. It is not something others may joke about without my consent. So you can still have it be funny and the butt of jokes, but it has to be from the character’s own choice, and it is not a punching down manner. Anne and I will get to humour eventually, I swear. We are working on it, right? (Anne: working so hard! And everyone will love the result)
Anyway, you can make great fictional ones and do great job destigmatising mental health issues and illnesses, but it requires a level of care that a lot of writers and worldbuilders might not be ready for. If you are uncertain, stay away from this one as the harm you cause might be greater than any good you could do, even with the best of intentions. But if you are ready to do the work and give this justice, the invisible illnesses, then go for it with the care it deserves.
As stated before, this is one big place where you can show off the values of your society and even characters, both positively and negatively for narrative purposes. Even if you do not wish to write a story with mental health focused characters, their reactions to others that have these can speak volumes about the world, society and characters.
Parasitical
Technically, this applies to all forms of disease that involves another organism doing things to you, but for the sake of simplicity in this blog, it refers only to ANIMALS being parasitic onto each other. This generally means that the animal in question is extremely simple. This is why there are almost no vertebrate parasites. The closest we really get are external parasites (exoparasites) that latch on and primarily suck blood which… is a lame “Illness”.
This is why most parasites that can cause significant diseases are very small, often single celled or only a few hundreds. When they get larger (Yes, I am counting hundreds to many thousand of cells as large here), they often also share a very familiar form: the worm form. Worm is not a family of organisms but a designation based on a general body shape. This has re-evolved time and time again because it is incredibly useful, especially in parasitic situations.
But even with these constraints, you can have them do interesting things. However, the fact they are generally bigger than viruses or bacteria makes it much easier to detect and find cures against. But similar to viruses, they have a vested interest in the host’s survival as once the host dies, there is nothing left to take. So these generally quickly evolve to non-lethal levels if they stick around.
Unless it is a parasite with a multi-species life cycle, at which all but the last host generally hinges on the host being eaten by the next stage. Too bad, but the parasite got the next host anyway! As top predators, for obvious reasons, parasites generally only become non-lethal for this reason. There is nothing that can hunt and eat us reasonably so trying to kill us is a futile attempt; better use us as the final stage if so.
Genetic
These are diseases that originate from the DNA. Some error in the coding causes proteins and more to not fold right, jobs to not be done in the order or way it “should”, and thus can cause all kinds of havoc. It is… quite insane in how much these can do. It can be people that have so that any damage they take turns cells into bones, it can be restructuring of the brain (Hello Autism!), it can be degenerative (getting worse over time), and so much more. The wide range of possibilities here is absolutely boinkers. I include it for completionist sake and to say this essentially:
A “cure” to it can generally only come based on one of three flavours of illness. First, the illness is developmental, which means once the baby pops out, it is too late, so any changes to “cure” it must be before those parts develop, thus giving a very short window of detection when the cure can “help”. I use quotation marks because as an autist, I don’t need no stinking “cure”! I am fine just the way I am.
Another is when it is a slow thing, at which genetic modification can assist later. It does not disturb the general development growing up, but something later triggers it, and then it starts happening. At the stages before a change to the genes, the body can do all that is needed. An example, despite not being innately inborn, is cancer. It comes much later and can technically be fixed with the right genetic tools, which you humans sorely lack. (hint hint later)
The third one is a body's lack of ability to produce something, and depending on what, it can be supplemented by medicine which makes it the most likely one to be easily rectified early on. Lactose intolerance is an example, albeit if it is an illness is debatable, given most of humanity has it, but you know…I LOVE CHEESE AND MILK!
Speculative Diseases
Okay, you humans now have some taste of what there is. It is a lot… so much, and so much is disturbing. Now, what can we do for fiction?
Designing a disease
Well, to design a disease, or illness, I would say you do it in the follow steps:
Identify the cause: What is it that causes the disease? Is it a fungus? Bacteria? Virus? Or what? This matters because it determines how the illness will operate and certain important constraints that we’ve mentioned. You can use fictional causes as well of course!
Identify what the thing is going after and why: As I discussed above, all the things can go after things. Some viruses go respiratory because it is easier to spread. Some bacteria go for water because all life drinks water. Fungi as described above can go for different things depending on how they chose to use them for reproduction. There can be many points of “attack” depending on what the organism in question wants. Or if it is genetic where the proteins are active and start causing issues, or “invisible” like many mental health issues.
Figure out from 1 and 2 what the natural symptoms are. Coughing is not an accident, it is to get irritants out of the lungs. Unfortunately, the viruses are more than happy to hijack this to spread themselves! Symptoms are not random.
Expand on 3 to how people can diagnose the disease and what is required to actually detect this disease. Not all diseases are easy to diagnose and some require very specific forms of technology (or magic) to be detectable. So diseases can go untreated for ages.
Based on 1 and 2, you can also start working on what could possibly cure it, which I will get into in a bit.
Science Fiction
Science fiction. Boy, isn’t there a lot here we can do? Different species, different kingdoms (see previous blog linked above) that can do things. There are so many things to do. I need to do a practicum on this. But imagine all possibilities that could be in our world, and what might be and all. It is never ending. One idea I had, for example, is what I call “fungruses”, a portmanteau of “fungus” and “Viruses”. The idea is that it does not spread with spores but virus particles. Once the virus lands, it infects cells like normal, but instead of hijacking the cellular machinery to make more viruses endlessly, it completely rewrites the internal DNA and machinery and makes it to an entirely new cell that then starts behaving more like a fungus. It grows and expands until it has enough to start producing the viruses, then releases it to the atmosphere or spreads the viruses in the manner it does according to its life cycle.
We are getting fungal body horror and virus horror together!
Fantasy
What can we do in fantasy? Well, you have the usual stuff that I have discussed above. But the big one I rarely see done is mana diseases. If you imagine that life has magic, mana, and such innate to it, just to be alive or part of their bodies so they can manipulate it and thus do magic? What happens if some creatures, some viruses, some other things, start messing with the person's “mana field”? What illnesses and diseases can come up then? Lots, I imagine. It of course depends on your magic system, but there is so much untapped potential here I feel. Now, it could generally just be a normal disease, no magic mana relation to it, and then magic heals it. That is BORING! What if the mana disease is such that using mana only makes it worse? Let creativity flow! Don’t do Random Magical Disease #289 with Random Magical Cure B that seem to have little to no relation. I’ll have my keyboard monkey (Lady Verbosa, aka Anne) do a practicum on this. (Anne: Ugh, again I do all the work! 🙄 This actually sounds interesting so… fine, I guess I can do it! 😁👍)
Susceptibility
When it comes to the many types of illnesses that an organism can endure, not all species are equally susceptible to said diseases and their types. For example, if you look at plants, fungi are a huge issue for them. Bacteria are much less of an issue, cancer itself is completely harmless, and viruses, a minor inconvenience at most. But fungi? Those can completely wreak havoc on plants and their entire population. This of course differs greatly from plant to plant, where trees are generally the sturdiest, but a fungus of the right sort can destroy most of them while the others generally do little that the plant cares about.
For animals, there is a huge array of variation in susceptibility. Not only do animals work much harder to constantly attack each other, they develop more advanced immune systems! Well, some of them do. Ever heard of zombie fungi? Yeah, I told you already, goldfish brains! But for larger animals and more complicated immune systems, it is generally more complicated for external illnesses to deal with.
A trend we have noticed in larger animals is that certain diseases, like ageing related illnesses and cancer, are significantly reduced in terms of the impact it has on the organism. It's not certain if it is due to heavier investment in cancer prevention or that the organisms are simply so large that most of these issues are simply too insignificant to matter at that scale. These are of course not absolutes in any case, but these are some examples that can make species and branches within kingdoms differently susceptible to different categories of diseases. Some might be more easily infected by type X and another by type Y, thus making their medical technologies and experiences vastly different!
A personal example is my beloved species called Raixher (Sg: Raixhe, blog post will come) who are planimals (plant-animal hybrids). They are generally quite apt at dealing with animal parasites as to their immune system, the animal parasite stands out like a bloody thumb, and thus they can resist such issues easily. What they are weaker toward is, as I said above about plants, fungi. Fungi of certain kinds can really cripple them and weaken them. So their major concern when encountering new species is not bacteria or viruses, but what fungi the new world might have.
Demic
For transmissible diseases, that is diseases that can go from one individual to another, there are various stages and states it can be, and all end in “demic”, hence I made this.
Endemic
Endemic is the most common one. A perfect example is the common cold. It is natural, and it goes around in many rounds each year. What makes something endemic is that it is consistently present in the region and is generally limited in the region it is. So maybe the common cold isn’t the best example, as that goes all over the place, but I would personally loosen it to mean it is considered native and “natural” within the population of the region. It is, regardless of its severity, considered a natural part of life in the region. But hey, that’s my definition of it.
Epidemic
This is most often when a disease that may be endemic by previous definition, but does not have to be, gets a sudden and huge spike in cases. There can be many causes for this sudden increase in cases. A new variant of it, someone contaminated the water supply, or a cow accidentally shat at the wrong place, and now you have lots of cholera. It is the sudden, but highly localised, spike that makes it epidemic.
Pandemic
This is the one you just went through! Covid 19 and all that jazz! Good times, Good times, so many dead and so much economic destruction. Said some villain I bet. Anyway, the technical definition is that it has exponential growth and is essentially beyond being contained. And the localisation of it is now much broader. Instead of being a small region, it can be several nations that are exponentially growing in cases. Once the cases start levelling off and are not in the exponential case, it is always by these standards no longer a pandemic. But of course people gonna people and keep using the word because it is generally a huge shock to society and people at large so it is “the pandemic” for a long ass time. Until the next one, at which that is the one then.
My personal definition that I think would be more useful for us worldbuilders is that a transmissible disease is pandemic when the disease is spreading fast (exponentially) at some point of the time, becoming unstoppable, then leaving that stage when it can possibly be contained. All that is left after that is to wait for it to either disappear, a cure to be found, or sufficiently many to become immune.
Cures
I have been alluding to this time and time again, so here we go! This is inherently a very vague thing and has many edge cases. Not everything is treatable or curable in any sense. One might be stuck with an illness for the rest of their lives, and some are of course innate that you are stuck with from the beginning. I won’t go into the cases of obvious permanent things, as I have talked about the difference in views on what constitutes an illness or disease. But I will add that how they chose to “treat” the supposed incurable “illnesses” can again be a means by which you demonstrate their culture, views, and values.
Symptom vs source
One thing to differentiate between is that not all illnesses are treatable after a certain point or even at all. At that point, it means we have to treat the symptoms instead because the source cannot be dealt with. This can be anything from bacteria to viruses to genetic disorders to more. In some cases, it is a technology question. Are the people of your world advanced enough to act on the source, or can they only deal with the negative symptoms? Diabetes is an example of people having the symptom treated as we cannot fix the source (depending on the type). Cancer went from untreatable to mostly treatable. So depending on progress, it can go from untreatable to symptom treatable to source treatable.
Medicine
Some people, new age or scaredy cats, often think “Medicine” just means the industrial produced and such, and no. People have through the ages done medicine. What has happened is that as technology and more have progressed, the need for medicine has grown so one has to industrially scale it for it to work. What used to be “Traditional medicine” has been tested, the active ingredients located, and then everything is purified. And if we can, mass produce it in some way.
So medicine encompasses all things used to deal with diseases and illnesses, including practicality, but I chose to make it its own category here anyway to explain it. But medicine can be tools, chemicals, magic, literally anything that helps dealing with a disease. Due to us being chemical beings, a lot will be chemical related, but you can get really creative! With magic, throw in some scifi mumbo jumbo stuff.
“Natural” Medicine
This is often considered by some to be distinct from medicine, but as I said, it isn’t. But it gets its own entry for personal reasons! I’ll get to it soon. This is generally viewed as those that have not undergone the purification and industrialisation of medicine, and this can be fun to play around with. If it is pre-industrial, this is of course all that you have access to. Minus some potential tools, of course. Keep in mind, it generally means you get products and things from nature itself, be it fungi, plants, animals, or whatever else you have. If they can produce it, it is “natural”.
This of course when it comes to large populations is completely infeasible and will most likely result in sapient beings hunting the creatures involved into extinction. This is why the industrialisation aspect happens for a lot of medicine. It is not altruistic care for other lifeforms, but a simple fact that it gets too difficult after a while to find what you need, so artificial means are sought to replace it. Same thing happened to rubber actually!
Now onto the personal reason, just to give some inspiration. I have designed a character for my story, Vlartso as he is called. For personal reasons, he became obsessed about more natural things. He is old enough to know it was a dumb thing, but he was young enough at the time that he didn't know better. He knows now that normal medicine is just fine, but he still to this day prefers the natural. If he has a choice, he goes for it over other things. Now, why does it matter much? It adds to his character, and for me personally (being a worldbuilding maniac), it gives me the chance to imagine all kinds of crazy things to use for treatment! It adds more to the world given it is a space opera, and there are so many forms of life. One example that he uses is a fungus called “Sanichor”. You put the spores in an open wound, and they feed on the blood and cover the entire wound, thus making it stop bleeding. After that, the spores help stimulate the cells around to make it heal faster. What does it get from this? Food from the animal, and once the wound is almost entirely healed, a pod grown out from the spores bursts out more spores for its next stage of its life cycle. So it gets spread out more.
Preventative
Cures and treatments are all good and dandy, but you know what is better than curing an illness? Never getting it! Which for certain types of “illnesses” can be incredibly problematic, but hey, maybe your fictional society is a bunch of bastards? Anyway, the important thing is that certain illnesses can be preemptively fought and dealt with. The most common and by far greatest medical discovery ever by how many lives it has saved is… VACCINES! They prevent you from catching a disease by making it so your immune system is only on the lookout for the culprits of the disease! Be it bacteria, viruses or anything really. So when the disease bringer comes in, your immune system is ready to stomp it out! No Covid allowed!
Acute & Chronic
Diseases can be acute or not, and chronic or not. When it is acute, it is extremely bad and/or extremely fast. It is usually a sign of either other diseases interfering, making it worse, or that the individual is in fact more sensitive to this illness than others might be. This happens with all kinds of things because people are biologically different. What I shrug off like a flu can be absolutely lethal to you due to our differences. So in a way, you can do the susceptibility thing but on an individual level by having the illness be more acute.
Chronic means that a disease is generally not curable. You are stuck with it. Or at best, it just takes a really long time to be dealt with. Though if the word is used is another judgement call done by people, and not all diseases are treated the same for this. Some are considered chronic when it is longer than a few months, some are chronic only when it has been years.
Micro-Practicum: Anti-cancer-virus
Well the name is a bit of a misnomer honestly. It was initially conjured to be anti-radiation or deal with radiation damage. The fact it works as anti-cancer medication was a happy addition 😀 I call it Zedrep, I have forgotten why 🤔 Anyhow, I do remember how it works! It is a bit convoluted, but bear with me.You inject the virus into the body, then it starts latching onto cells and goes inside, business as usual. Then, like normal, it hijacks the cellular machinery and makes copies of itself, as many as it can. Except slightly differently. They are not exact copies but are in a new state/form. Then are ejected like a normal virus and made to spread as much as possible within the body. These enter new cells and instead of doing the same thing again, the Zedrep-II (stage 2) viruses go into the nucleus, copy the DNA, then create new viruses with the Cell’s DNA within it and are then ejected. Not destroying the cell! These new viruses, Zedrep-III (stage 3) are built such that they need to find 2 other Zedrep-III’s that (hopefully) come from other cells. Then this trio is absorbed into new cells. It is now the magic starts happening!
As the cell is starting to make new Zedrep-III’s, the virus is also using the three copies of host cell DNA and starting to compare the base pairs. In each position it compares what is there and while it is doing that, it is creating a fourth strand of DNA. This fourth one is built such that the most common base pair is selected for. That is, if 2 of the strands say A, and one says T, then it makes the new strand with an A. If all 3 are different, it grabs whichever comes first to it. This new fourth strand (with the three previous ones being broken down as the new one is built) is then put into the new Zedrep-III’s, and again, ejected to repeat the cycle. This is done over and over for a great many times. Eventually, once enough times has happened, the final stage is made. Zedrep-IV. In this stage, the virus is made in enormous numbers by the last cells getting Zedrep-III’s and released. Zedrep-IV’s do not check anymore, it takes the blueprint of the final DNA (Which probabilistically should be your original DNA) and replaces the damaged DNA you have with it. Mutations and damages are fixed, life can go on. Although intended to heal radiation damage, it happens to help get rid of the mutations that cause cancer. What a bonus! Take your yearly Zedrep Shot and you can kiss cancer goodbye! Albeit why you wanna kiss it is beyond me, but hey, you do you!
Summa Summarum
Diseases and illnesses can be very interesting and tell a great deal about a society–how they view each other, how they view health in general, as a right or privilege?–and what values they have. Lots of culture can easily be put on display with these. And it also gives creative ways for you to show weirdnesses within your world. It can be woven into the foundations of your magic, your technology, and much else. It can be narratively important as well, even if it is a small thing. How creative can you get? Life is very strange, life is stranger than fiction, but can you be stranger than most other fiction?
Do you have any topics you struggle with or would like to suggest for a future blogpost? We’re open to suggestions!
Copyright ©️ 2023 - Present, Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as fungrus are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Vlartso the character, Raixhe the species, Sanichor the healing fungus, Zedrep the virus, and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission.
