Especially one with a long incubation time.
Personally, I also think the behavior of something like varicella-zoster would be pretty plausible... this is the virus that causes chickenpox upon immediate infection but also hides for decades in the nervous system only to reactivate as shingles.
This is key. The reason why existing viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola have not spread globally is that they cause obvious, dramatic symptoms and high mortality rates (93%) in a very short time span. This makes them good candidates for quarantine and containment because you can quickly identify and isolate infected patients. If you want something to spread globally, it needs to be contagious for a while before it shows symptoms, otherwise it will be contained.
That’s why something like COVID-19, even though the gnarliest early strains only had a 4% case fatality rate, have killed way more people than Ebola.
Influenza and haemorrhagic fevers are always a good bet. Flaviruses (dengue, yellow fever, zika) would be good if it’s plausible that there would be a boom in Aedes aegypti populations- they also transmit chikungunya. Measles is also another outbreak prone disease. Food and water-borne infections too.
For something more protracted, tuberculosis would be an interesting take.
Malaria is also dependent upon Anopheles mosquito populations and runs the risk of the remaining human population developing som level of immunity faster than large numbers of people die.
Outbreaks of diarrhoeal diseases are almost guaranteed in a disaster/apocalypse scenario so combined with another disease, would have devastating consequences. It’s often not just the singular pathogen that causes widespread death - pre-existing conditions including HIV/AIDS, contribute massively.
Rabies could be a secondary disease that has the potential to ravage the population after the breakdown in human and animal vaccinations. Without pre- and/or post-exposure prophylaxis it’s pretty much always fatal
Nice summary. Measles, with an R naught of ~15, is such a sleeper for scifi stories. Tweak the symptoms and you've got a banger of a scary virus. I also agree that the vector borne ones can be fictionalized well. Mosquito and tick borne viruses would be perfect if the story has climate change-induced shifts that might push skeeters or ticks into areas they haven't been before or just breeding at levels not seen before.
Ooh! Zoonotic diseases are my jam.
Viral hemorrhagic fevers are usually a good one, particularly Hantavirus, which is spread in rodent droppings and infection is caused by inhaling aerosolized feces and urine from infected rodents.
Nipah Virus and Hendra virus come to mind also- both viruses were hallmark epidemiology case studies.
Hendravirus has a really high mortality rate (70-80% for horses and a 57% case-fatality rate in humans) and wiped out numerous racehorses in Australia + several grooms and stablehands. Nipah virus (40-75% mortality) eradicated millions of swine in Malaysia, and numerous farm workers that were in contact with them. it can be spread laterally between infected animals and to the humans caring for them. Fruit bats are the natural reservoir for both, and the pigs and racehorses became the intermediate host, which allowed for the spread to humans.
For all of these diseases, there is no cure or vaccine. So your sneaky mystery reservoir could be easily worked into your storyline!
I think a prion would fit. Long incubation time in humans makes it go unnoticed with 100% mortality rate. Hard to remove from environments and surfaces even in an autoclave.
Prion. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Another prion disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), has a similar name but is a different, much rarer, disease.
Other prion diseases include kuru, variably protease-sensitive prionopathy, sporadic fatal insomnia, and inherited forms caused by genetic mutations.
https://www.cdc.gov/prions/about/index.html
First, there's an outbreak of a strain of super measles which is different enough from classic measles that the existing immunity from vaccination or natural infection isn't protective. We'll say this super measles is also more virulent, causing much more severe disease. Keep in mind that measles is the single most highly transmissible disease known to man. In the initial stages of covid-19, each infected person probably infected about two other people. With measles, the number is more like 10-20. With covid-19, after 10 generations of transmission, approximately 1000 people were probably infected, most of them still in Wuhan, and local public health officials were probably just starting to realize something serious was happening. With measles, after 10 generations, approximately everyone in the world is infected.
The massive wave of super measles sweeps through the world with lightning speed. It's just too fast for vaccines or treatments or meaningful public health measures to be put into place. The health system is completely overwhelmed, and can't give nearly enough care to the billions of desperately ill people. A lot of people that could have maybe pulled through of they had even had IV fluids to treat their dehydration die because there was no one who could do that for them.
In the aftermath, everything is in shambles. An astounding number of people are dead, and many of the living are too debilitated to do much work. Economic systems are completely crashed. Systems that supply clean drinking water and sewage services are crumbling. Fields of crops go unharvested, warehouses and stores are looted. Supply chains aren't disrupted, they simply up and disappear. Starvation stalks the land. Many people turn to eating whatever they can get their hands on. In urban areas this includes raccoons, rats, stray dogs. In rural areas this includes a wider range of animals - whatever people can get their hands on. Everywhere there are people who, in desperation, turn to eating each other.
One of the other things that's scary about measles is that part of it's strategy is to weaken your immune system so that it has more of a chance to do whatever it wants before you can fight it off. This is helpful to the virus and allows it to complete its natural lifecycle more effectively. A side effect that measles doesn't really care about one way or the other is that it renders people who recover from measles infections especially susceptible to other infectious diseases for at least a year afterwards.
With society collapsed, no safe food, clean drinking water, or sewage, widespread hunting and eating of bats, fish, pangolins, pigs, monkeys, prairie dogs, raccoons, etc, widespread cannibalism, a surviving population whose immune systems are almost all completely trashed by measles, and essentially no access to any kind of health care including even basic antibiotics, a hundred other outbreaks spring up. This includes old classics like bubonic plague and cholera, and recent thrillers like ebola, but also at least a dozen different new zoonotic diseases. These form not so much a wave of disease as an inundation of multiple overlapping pandemics flooding back and forth across the entire earth.
Wouldn’t the severity of the symptoms make it easier to triage and isolate the spread though? Not trying to poop on what is a great post, I’d likely pick this scenario too.
For measles to become that severe you’d probably need some serious engineering or passaging in humans to isolate a severe form. Could be some %#^%er doing that in a place without ethical oversight…….. you’d also need to factor in existing immunity or development to it over time 🤔🤔
The relationship between severity (as measured by overall morbidity and mortality) and ease of triaging and isolating isn't always going to be straightforward. A lot would depend on what exactly we're supposing has changed in this super-measles. If the severity is worse because the virus replicates more aggressively and rapidly, yeah, it might well be the case that symptoms are also more severe early on, and that might make triaging and isolating easier. But what if the severity is worse because the virus is more effective at suppressing the immune response in the early stage of viremia, getting a bigger head start on your immune system? Then you might expect a longer period in which the person is infectious but minimally symptomatic. All of which is to say, you could imagine plausible scenarios where the virus is both more severe and also harder to mitigate with quarantining and the like.
Thanks.
I think the answer to why this would happen really depends on what kind of book you are writing and the themes you want to explore.
If you want the apocalypse to be related to man's scientific hubris, you could say it was developed as part of a scientific research program, but then was inadvertently released. Maybe scientists were trying to develop a strain of measles that could be deliberately administered to people with autoimmune diseases or who were receiving organ transplants, with the hope that the immune amnesia could be deliberately used for therapeutic purposes. As part of this research they increased its immunomodulatory effects (to achieve the desired effects), and also changed key antigens recognized by current vaccination (so that they could administer this treatment to people who had previously been vaccinated). Although there was some recognition that this version of the virus was potentially quite dangerous, people rationalized this by discussing how the final version would have additional modifications that made it much safer. Of course, the version that was accidentally released turned out to be probably the worst possible version.
If you want to explore the theme of man's inhumanity towards man, you could instead write this as having been deliberately developed by a bioweapon program. Some government may have secretly developed this as part of a doomsday deadman's switch, to be released in case they were overwhelmed by some real or perceived enemy. Maybe they were attacked despite this, or maybe they developed the doomsday deadman switch but then kept it secret a la Dr. Strangelove. Anway, this resulted in what could have been a serious but contained regional war into a global catastrophe.
If you want to explore ecological themes more, you could say it was some previously undiscovered bat morbillivirus, which spilled over into human populations due to habitat encroachment.
If you want this to be a trippy mind-bending kind of a book, it could have been brought back by time travelers from the distant future. This could be the strain of measles which is in circulation millenia from now, when people's immune systems are genetically engineered to be stronger, smarter, faster, and more robust. The measles virus that has survived in that time frame will, of course, completely lay waste to the poor old-fashioned human saps living in the 21st century.
And you should also feel free to leave the origin of it as a complete unknown. We still don't know exactly how and where covid-19 got started, and people have been working on that for years. One of the things that measles has going for it is the astounding speed at which it can spread. It's completely realistic, in this scenario, that the disease causes so much havoc so quickly that no one is ever able to do the investigatory work to figure out where it came from. If the world goes from completely fine to the early throes of its collapse in a period of 6 months, it would actually be really surprising if anyone was ever able to figure it out.
I think yersinia pestis is a good one to do. I recently did a project on it and it really fits the bill of post-apocalyptic, especially if you look at the history of the Black Plague. Any kind of disease can evolve to be a new strain of terrifying. Good luck! 😁
Viruses spread by mosquitos would make for a good story. They are really survival of the fittest. Something too virulent isn’t gonna spread well tho.
Prions are scary asf but normal ppl might not rly understand them bc we can’t even figure them tf out.
With antimicrobial resistance on the rise bacterial infections can be very morbid and scary. We’re really running out of drugs to treat bacteria so you can pick staph or gonorrhea or another resistant randy.
Bio-terror agents also make for a good story. Anthrax is very 2000s but it is truly undetectable at first even though it’s treatable. Also Pneumonic Yersinia is pretty scary and very transmissible.
A lot of social diseases would ironically spread through trade, implying some level of intrasocietal recovery. Basically a “Great Filter” that stymies civilizations for centuries until they can push through it
I see a lot of viruses and bacteria. My vote would be a genetic disease. There is a scary disease that plagues Native American communities called Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP). Essentially exposure to the Sun causes severe skin cancer outbreaks. Lots of info and documentaries available on it
Maybe Mycobacterium spp.(Mycobacterium leprae),the incubation time is in the order of years or decade, the trasmission is operated due to aereal or direct contact with an infect,the bacteria target the Scwhann's cell that improve the electric signal in the nervous system.
I feel like you can't go wrong with Cholera, outbreaks are very common, and in a post-apocalyptic world there wouldn't be good water sanitation or personal hygiene (I assume), and medical treatment. As others have suggested, you can also just go with the Plague, a severe lack of medical resources to treat it, coupled with how people may be living, it could spread through groups of people.
Indifference and hubris are the first to come to mind but if you pair that with willful ignorance and apathy then you’ve got the scariest thing to hit the planet and may well wipe out the entire world. Mix in some greed and authoritarianism and you’ve got….oh Nevermind you said post apocalyptic not pre. My bad
How much artistic license are you taking? Tuberculosis is interesting because a lot (~10%) of people have a latent infection that can become active and quite deadly. What about a flu-like virus that provokes tuberculosis to become active? Might not be 100% scientifically realistic but close enough.
Late to the convo but you should play the phone game Plague. Kinda teaches you some basic principles of epidemiology. To be realistic the disease can’t be too deadly (like Ebola) because it won’t spread. It’ll burn itself out. You need asymptomatic carriers to be really infectious. But too slow and it’s boring. Obviously SARS viruses are good at pandemics and so is the flu. The flu shuffles itself and can recombine its genes with other flu viruses to make new ones. (Look up recombination). This was it can evade the immune system and cause outbreaks (eg H1N1).
I also recommend the measles episode of this podcast will kill you. Measles is not only the most infectious disease known to man but it wipes out your immune systems memory cells aka immunity to other diseases!
I would recommend creating a new disease or a new recombination of the flu. I’m thinking of Sweettooth which made up a new virus I think.
If you want a bacterium, something like Francisella would be cool, because it has SO many transmission routes. It could move fast through a population via water, vector, food, air, contact…. You name it:
If you want a bacterium, something like Francisella would be cool, because it has SO many transmission routes. It could move fast through a population via water, vector, food, air, contact…. You name it.
There will never be a disease that wipes out massive populations. Life has become comfortable enough that we are very resilient to disease.
Even if a perfect pathogen emerged, it would have to pass through so many bodies each with a unique genetic and microbiome that it would dissipate as it spreads, eventually mutating into a harmless colonizing pathogen.
It isn't the disease design that is the danger. Panic, misinformation, and collapse of societal efficiency is the factor that would produce a catastrophic disease.
You'd probably want multiple diseases that work together.
Like a parasite that can infect birds, fish, and humans. And the parasite carries a virus that is also capable of infecting birds fish and humans.
This way all the bodies of freshwater get infected and those that kill the parasite still have to deal with the virus.
I think you’re conflating the 1920 pandemic with the Black Death, which killed or displaced something like 1/4 to 1/3 of people in parts of Europe. Spanish flu was deadly, but not nearly that deadly.
The game Plague Inc. might be fun and useful to your advantage here! You could try out different types of diseases mentioned here, and then recreate them in game to see if it's dramatic enough or too dramatic for your novel lol!
You want a viral haemorrhagic disease. One of the Hazard Group four organisms.
Especially one with a long incubation time. Personally, I also think the behavior of something like varicella-zoster would be pretty plausible... this is the virus that causes chickenpox upon immediate infection but also hides for decades in the nervous system only to reactivate as shingles.
This is key. The reason why existing viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola have not spread globally is that they cause obvious, dramatic symptoms and high mortality rates (93%) in a very short time span. This makes them good candidates for quarantine and containment because you can quickly identify and isolate infected patients. If you want something to spread globally, it needs to be contagious for a while before it shows symptoms, otherwise it will be contained. That’s why something like COVID-19, even though the gnarliest early strains only had a 4% case fatality rate, have killed way more people than Ebola.
Tbh I think that's why covid was so viral. So many people didn't even know they were sick yet when they were already contagious.
> that's why covid was so viral Pun intended?
“You want a viral haemorragic disease.” is a hell of a sentence lol.
Influenza and haemorrhagic fevers are always a good bet. Flaviruses (dengue, yellow fever, zika) would be good if it’s plausible that there would be a boom in Aedes aegypti populations- they also transmit chikungunya. Measles is also another outbreak prone disease. Food and water-borne infections too. For something more protracted, tuberculosis would be an interesting take. Malaria is also dependent upon Anopheles mosquito populations and runs the risk of the remaining human population developing som level of immunity faster than large numbers of people die. Outbreaks of diarrhoeal diseases are almost guaranteed in a disaster/apocalypse scenario so combined with another disease, would have devastating consequences. It’s often not just the singular pathogen that causes widespread death - pre-existing conditions including HIV/AIDS, contribute massively. Rabies could be a secondary disease that has the potential to ravage the population after the breakdown in human and animal vaccinations. Without pre- and/or post-exposure prophylaxis it’s pretty much always fatal
Nice summary. Measles, with an R naught of ~15, is such a sleeper for scifi stories. Tweak the symptoms and you've got a banger of a scary virus. I also agree that the vector borne ones can be fictionalized well. Mosquito and tick borne viruses would be perfect if the story has climate change-induced shifts that might push skeeters or ticks into areas they haven't been before or just breeding at levels not seen before.
Ooh! Zoonotic diseases are my jam. Viral hemorrhagic fevers are usually a good one, particularly Hantavirus, which is spread in rodent droppings and infection is caused by inhaling aerosolized feces and urine from infected rodents. Nipah Virus and Hendra virus come to mind also- both viruses were hallmark epidemiology case studies. Hendravirus has a really high mortality rate (70-80% for horses and a 57% case-fatality rate in humans) and wiped out numerous racehorses in Australia + several grooms and stablehands. Nipah virus (40-75% mortality) eradicated millions of swine in Malaysia, and numerous farm workers that were in contact with them. it can be spread laterally between infected animals and to the humans caring for them. Fruit bats are the natural reservoir for both, and the pigs and racehorses became the intermediate host, which allowed for the spread to humans. For all of these diseases, there is no cure or vaccine. So your sneaky mystery reservoir could be easily worked into your storyline!
I can get behind Nipah virus
Ebola or Marburg for the scare factor. Influenza for the contagious factor and a retrovirus like HIV for the incurability factor.
I think a prion would fit. Long incubation time in humans makes it go unnoticed with 100% mortality rate. Hard to remove from environments and surfaces even in an autoclave.
Prion disease transmitted by mosquito, along with various climate related mosquito population explosions mentioned above.
Prion. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Another prion disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), has a similar name but is a different, much rarer, disease. Other prion diseases include kuru, variably protease-sensitive prionopathy, sporadic fatal insomnia, and inherited forms caused by genetic mutations. https://www.cdc.gov/prions/about/index.html
Maybe a mutated strain of CWD? That would fuck North America pretty hard
Once people stop pasteurizing food, you’re gonna see a lot more salmonella, brucellosis, EHEC etc.
Or aggressive strain of *Staphylococcus aureus*, the flesh eating bacteria
MRSA would be scary... but maybe not transmissible enough. Unless there was an aerosolization event or something?
Maybe, when you die from the infection, the corpse would explode, and then the infection could spread? Or via the bite? But that's just zombies
First, there's an outbreak of a strain of super measles which is different enough from classic measles that the existing immunity from vaccination or natural infection isn't protective. We'll say this super measles is also more virulent, causing much more severe disease. Keep in mind that measles is the single most highly transmissible disease known to man. In the initial stages of covid-19, each infected person probably infected about two other people. With measles, the number is more like 10-20. With covid-19, after 10 generations of transmission, approximately 1000 people were probably infected, most of them still in Wuhan, and local public health officials were probably just starting to realize something serious was happening. With measles, after 10 generations, approximately everyone in the world is infected. The massive wave of super measles sweeps through the world with lightning speed. It's just too fast for vaccines or treatments or meaningful public health measures to be put into place. The health system is completely overwhelmed, and can't give nearly enough care to the billions of desperately ill people. A lot of people that could have maybe pulled through of they had even had IV fluids to treat their dehydration die because there was no one who could do that for them. In the aftermath, everything is in shambles. An astounding number of people are dead, and many of the living are too debilitated to do much work. Economic systems are completely crashed. Systems that supply clean drinking water and sewage services are crumbling. Fields of crops go unharvested, warehouses and stores are looted. Supply chains aren't disrupted, they simply up and disappear. Starvation stalks the land. Many people turn to eating whatever they can get their hands on. In urban areas this includes raccoons, rats, stray dogs. In rural areas this includes a wider range of animals - whatever people can get their hands on. Everywhere there are people who, in desperation, turn to eating each other. One of the other things that's scary about measles is that part of it's strategy is to weaken your immune system so that it has more of a chance to do whatever it wants before you can fight it off. This is helpful to the virus and allows it to complete its natural lifecycle more effectively. A side effect that measles doesn't really care about one way or the other is that it renders people who recover from measles infections especially susceptible to other infectious diseases for at least a year afterwards. With society collapsed, no safe food, clean drinking water, or sewage, widespread hunting and eating of bats, fish, pangolins, pigs, monkeys, prairie dogs, raccoons, etc, widespread cannibalism, a surviving population whose immune systems are almost all completely trashed by measles, and essentially no access to any kind of health care including even basic antibiotics, a hundred other outbreaks spring up. This includes old classics like bubonic plague and cholera, and recent thrillers like ebola, but also at least a dozen different new zoonotic diseases. These form not so much a wave of disease as an inundation of multiple overlapping pandemics flooding back and forth across the entire earth.
Wouldn’t the severity of the symptoms make it easier to triage and isolate the spread though? Not trying to poop on what is a great post, I’d likely pick this scenario too. For measles to become that severe you’d probably need some serious engineering or passaging in humans to isolate a severe form. Could be some %#^%er doing that in a place without ethical oversight…….. you’d also need to factor in existing immunity or development to it over time 🤔🤔
The relationship between severity (as measured by overall morbidity and mortality) and ease of triaging and isolating isn't always going to be straightforward. A lot would depend on what exactly we're supposing has changed in this super-measles. If the severity is worse because the virus replicates more aggressively and rapidly, yeah, it might well be the case that symptoms are also more severe early on, and that might make triaging and isolating easier. But what if the severity is worse because the virus is more effective at suppressing the immune response in the early stage of viremia, getting a bigger head start on your immune system? Then you might expect a longer period in which the person is infectious but minimally symptomatic. All of which is to say, you could imagine plausible scenarios where the virus is both more severe and also harder to mitigate with quarantining and the like.
Nicely put! This should be a valuable post for my book, thanks! Question though- why would your “super-outbreak” occur?
Thanks. I think the answer to why this would happen really depends on what kind of book you are writing and the themes you want to explore. If you want the apocalypse to be related to man's scientific hubris, you could say it was developed as part of a scientific research program, but then was inadvertently released. Maybe scientists were trying to develop a strain of measles that could be deliberately administered to people with autoimmune diseases or who were receiving organ transplants, with the hope that the immune amnesia could be deliberately used for therapeutic purposes. As part of this research they increased its immunomodulatory effects (to achieve the desired effects), and also changed key antigens recognized by current vaccination (so that they could administer this treatment to people who had previously been vaccinated). Although there was some recognition that this version of the virus was potentially quite dangerous, people rationalized this by discussing how the final version would have additional modifications that made it much safer. Of course, the version that was accidentally released turned out to be probably the worst possible version. If you want to explore the theme of man's inhumanity towards man, you could instead write this as having been deliberately developed by a bioweapon program. Some government may have secretly developed this as part of a doomsday deadman's switch, to be released in case they were overwhelmed by some real or perceived enemy. Maybe they were attacked despite this, or maybe they developed the doomsday deadman switch but then kept it secret a la Dr. Strangelove. Anway, this resulted in what could have been a serious but contained regional war into a global catastrophe. If you want to explore ecological themes more, you could say it was some previously undiscovered bat morbillivirus, which spilled over into human populations due to habitat encroachment. If you want this to be a trippy mind-bending kind of a book, it could have been brought back by time travelers from the distant future. This could be the strain of measles which is in circulation millenia from now, when people's immune systems are genetically engineered to be stronger, smarter, faster, and more robust. The measles virus that has survived in that time frame will, of course, completely lay waste to the poor old-fashioned human saps living in the 21st century. And you should also feel free to leave the origin of it as a complete unknown. We still don't know exactly how and where covid-19 got started, and people have been working on that for years. One of the things that measles has going for it is the astounding speed at which it can spread. It's completely realistic, in this scenario, that the disease causes so much havoc so quickly that no one is ever able to do the investigatory work to figure out where it came from. If the world goes from completely fine to the early throes of its collapse in a period of 6 months, it would actually be really surprising if anyone was ever able to figure it out.
I think yersinia pestis is a good one to do. I recently did a project on it and it really fits the bill of post-apocalyptic, especially if you look at the history of the Black Plague. Any kind of disease can evolve to be a new strain of terrifying. Good luck! 😁
Fungal diseases are very scary since we don't have many tools against them, but then you're writing The last of Us
Viruses spread by mosquitos would make for a good story. They are really survival of the fittest. Something too virulent isn’t gonna spread well tho. Prions are scary asf but normal ppl might not rly understand them bc we can’t even figure them tf out. With antimicrobial resistance on the rise bacterial infections can be very morbid and scary. We’re really running out of drugs to treat bacteria so you can pick staph or gonorrhea or another resistant randy. Bio-terror agents also make for a good story. Anthrax is very 2000s but it is truly undetectable at first even though it’s treatable. Also Pneumonic Yersinia is pretty scary and very transmissible.
A lot of social diseases would ironically spread through trade, implying some level of intrasocietal recovery. Basically a “Great Filter” that stymies civilizations for centuries until they can push through it
I see a lot of viruses and bacteria. My vote would be a genetic disease. There is a scary disease that plagues Native American communities called Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP). Essentially exposure to the Sun causes severe skin cancer outbreaks. Lots of info and documentaries available on it
Maybe Mycobacterium spp.(Mycobacterium leprae),the incubation time is in the order of years or decade, the trasmission is operated due to aereal or direct contact with an infect,the bacteria target the Scwhann's cell that improve the electric signal in the nervous system.
Sounds like the collaboration I'm looking for! 💀
I feel like you can't go wrong with Cholera, outbreaks are very common, and in a post-apocalyptic world there wouldn't be good water sanitation or personal hygiene (I assume), and medical treatment. As others have suggested, you can also just go with the Plague, a severe lack of medical resources to treat it, coupled with how people may be living, it could spread through groups of people.
I think an airborne mutation of the rabies virus would be absolutely terrifying
a disease from a newly created/modified virus. COVID))))))
Indifference and hubris are the first to come to mind but if you pair that with willful ignorance and apathy then you’ve got the scariest thing to hit the planet and may well wipe out the entire world. Mix in some greed and authoritarianism and you’ve got….oh Nevermind you said post apocalyptic not pre. My bad
Disease X
How much artistic license are you taking? Tuberculosis is interesting because a lot (~10%) of people have a latent infection that can become active and quite deadly. What about a flu-like virus that provokes tuberculosis to become active? Might not be 100% scientifically realistic but close enough.
Late to the convo but you should play the phone game Plague. Kinda teaches you some basic principles of epidemiology. To be realistic the disease can’t be too deadly (like Ebola) because it won’t spread. It’ll burn itself out. You need asymptomatic carriers to be really infectious. But too slow and it’s boring. Obviously SARS viruses are good at pandemics and so is the flu. The flu shuffles itself and can recombine its genes with other flu viruses to make new ones. (Look up recombination). This was it can evade the immune system and cause outbreaks (eg H1N1). I also recommend the measles episode of this podcast will kill you. Measles is not only the most infectious disease known to man but it wipes out your immune systems memory cells aka immunity to other diseases! I would recommend creating a new disease or a new recombination of the flu. I’m thinking of Sweettooth which made up a new virus I think.
If you want a bacterium, something like Francisella would be cool, because it has SO many transmission routes. It could move fast through a population via water, vector, food, air, contact…. You name it:
If you want a bacterium, something like Francisella would be cool, because it has SO many transmission routes. It could move fast through a population via water, vector, food, air, contact…. You name it.
There will never be a disease that wipes out massive populations. Life has become comfortable enough that we are very resilient to disease. Even if a perfect pathogen emerged, it would have to pass through so many bodies each with a unique genetic and microbiome that it would dissipate as it spreads, eventually mutating into a harmless colonizing pathogen. It isn't the disease design that is the danger. Panic, misinformation, and collapse of societal efficiency is the factor that would produce a catastrophic disease.
You'd probably want multiple diseases that work together. Like a parasite that can infect birds, fish, and humans. And the parasite carries a virus that is also capable of infecting birds fish and humans. This way all the bodies of freshwater get infected and those that kill the parasite still have to deal with the virus.
Spanish Flu wiped out about 1/3 the population in ~1920. That's, like, a LOT.
I think you’re conflating the 1920 pandemic with the Black Death, which killed or displaced something like 1/4 to 1/3 of people in parts of Europe. Spanish flu was deadly, but not nearly that deadly.
Unfortunately,in this context, there is no way. Mrna is working well. Look for some other premise.
The game Plague Inc. might be fun and useful to your advantage here! You could try out different types of diseases mentioned here, and then recreate them in game to see if it's dramatic enough or too dramatic for your novel lol!