/sci/ - Science and Mathematics

Somewhat.

The first decision you have to make is wether it is a virus or a bacterium. Bacteria are usually easier to cure since they are living beings, viruses are protein capsulas with RNA/DNA. Viruses are hard to find a cure/control, think Ebola, HIV, the Flu etc.

I personally would use a Virus, since bacteria have many weak points modern medicine can attack. The walls of Bacteria, their slime capsula, their metabolism etc., while we only start to understand how to fight Viruses if at all.

The second problem is that the people who survived the first iteration of the Virus develop antibodies. Sure, the medicine will carry most of the weight, but at the end of the day the body has to fight the fight and develop antibodies.

If they are to stay immune, these antibodies need to still be able to defend the body. But man has the capabilites to extract these antibodies from blood and use them to cure / vaccinate in form of a serum.

Unless your charactars don't share a genetic anamoly which protetcts them against the Virus, having them develop an immunity or making them unreceptive to the disease like some real life people have against HIV (They are carriers, but don't get sick.), they are either fucked because they aren't immune anymore or would use their antibodies to cure the disease.

Here are some "in a nutshell" style videos about diseases and the immune system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGOcOUBi6s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0opgc1WoS4

On life and death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCaacO8wus

Evolution (and please depict it realistically - not like plague inc. etc. No new mutation of a virus spreads in hours - this takes years. And the adaptation must make sense.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOfRN0KihOU

And since we're talking stories, one of my favourite webcomics about a disease mutating Mammals and other animals all over the world, only leaving Iceland and some remnants of the Scandinavian nations alive - and how a group of people goes to the "Silent World" in search for knowledge. It also plays with the themes of Immunity, Eugenics to spread immunity, dealing with a disease and the apocalypse in general. Stand Still, Stay Silent:

http://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=1

>>2324

I'll check that comic out, thanks.

Instead of a genetic anomaly, I was thinking that a small group of people are exposed to the virus initially, they get sick from it but survive it, and then when the virus mutates (over time - would a year be realistic?) and starts to spread, the initial people are immune to it, but the mutation within the virus means it is now much more powerful, so other new people that get it aren't able to survive it like they might have the original strain.

Definitely going to go with a virus, then.

>>2325

Sounds reasonable. You could make the disease affect the psychology of humans (or is that concept overused? Thinking of all the Zombie stories, movies and games out there.) . The first iteration is quite harmless, but testing and tampering around with it (Research lab? Military? Lunatic? Accident? Hospital?) makes a strand, which leads to violent behaviour become dominant, making treatment of patients who are ravingly mad very hard.

Another thing to consider is the way it spreads. By air, water, human excretions etc.

>>2326

The plot is primarily focused on the after-math, actually - I kind of want the disease to be deadly in its second iteration, because the plot itself mostly centers around the question/task of "rebuilding humanity" with a small group of characters that survived because they had been affected initially. I was thinking it would be cool if the initial exposure (to the non-deadly strain) happens in a small location with only a few people (not sure what this location would be - hospital, maybe) but then these people leave and go back into the world, some years pass perhaps, and then when it hits again and everyone starts dying, and they are immune, they think they are the last ones alive but they eventually start finding others that just happened to be in that location at the first instance too, and soon they work out where their immunity came from, and they know there are at least 100 (or however many it was at first) people out there still who are also immune, but the task is to find them, as they are now spread out all over the world again.

Not sure how it would spread, what do you think would be best?

>>2327

Maybe rev up the numbers a bit - 100 is pretty low concerning genetic variation. Would lead to inbreeding n shit. Maybe 5000-10000 or even more - genetic degredation can happen very fast. Maybe have the initial form infect an airport for good dispersal.

Air or water should be the way to go. They are unavoidable, fast and intrusive. Excretions from the body are very slow, see HIV compared to the flu.

>>2329

Airport is actually a brilliant idea, thanks! - gives me the opportunity to have a real variety of survivors. I guess they would quarantine it at first, then when they find that people are surviving they are allowed to return, but THEN the mutation happens once they are all back out.

Okay, do you think air would be faster than water? That intuitively makes sense to me. Would a timescale of a year be realistic for an airborne virus to wipe out pretty much the whole planet?

>>2330

Dunno, but since everyone would be dying left and right anarchy should follow soon after and accelerate it furthermore. I think about 1-2 years.

Air would be better, but people could use facial masks. It just needs to spread VERY rapidly and VERY aggressively.

Vaccines are basically weakened bacteria so clearly it does work.

However, when the pathogen acquires virulence mutations, it might also gain mutations that change its immune profile, so that immunity against the less virulent ancestor no longer applies. Especially with viruses, I suspect it will be all about the coat proteins. But once you start fucking with the coat, antibodies that bound one won't recognize the other.

As for the treatment, sure. Consider staph aureus. If you give it a few genes for antibiotic resistance, you get MRSA which is much harder to treat with antibiotics (which are otherwise very effective at controlling bacterial infections). But the effectiveness of your immune system won't be impacted much.