Disease or Not Disease: That Is the Question

My disease post has to be prefaced by a confession. I am not one of The Walking Dead faithful. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the show. But I only started watching this season, which is mighty late in the game. Sure. I read the first few graphic novels, but I didn't stick with them. They just weren't my cup of arsenic-laced cocoa at the time.

That said, I am a titch literal minded. Especially when it comes to something like the end of the world. I want to know how that came down. And now that this season's episodes are over I can ask the questions that no one else of my acquaintance seems to be able to answer.

What the hell? No. Seriously. I get that Rick and the other survivors don't know what happened. Whether the whole zombie thing was the result of disease or something else -let me say 'magic' in the absence of any other nonmedical mechanism. They have some indication from earlier episodes that everyone's infected with whatever this disease is. It doesn't matter how or when you die - in that world, if you die, you will turn into one of the undead until someone destroys your brain.

Did I mention we have Walking Dead viewing and potluck parties? Tasty.

Is the zombie plague in this show supposed to have been a disease or not? Based on some of the evidence - the way the disaster started and, subsequently spread, it seems like disease. Yet...I'm skeptical.

Clearly the zombie thing isn't transmitted person to person like strep throat. Transmission rates would be too slow to account for the outbreak described in the books and on the show. Viral transmission would make more sense. The disease could be airborne and could infect multiple people at any one go - when someone coughed or sneezed. If there's an incubation period, the infected, but not yet symptomatic, could travel anywhere in the world only to infect more people when symptoms did manifest. We've seen this actually happen with SARS and other illnesses.

The only problem is that in the course of human history, it's been proven following epidemic after epidemic, that if you infect a large enough segment of the species with a single disease, a certain percentage of that population will emerge as immune. Some will get sick and recover with no adverse effect. Some will never fall ill at all. It's as if their bodies are armored against that particular bug. (Which isn't to say that the next thing to come along won't kill them, but that's a different post.)

Still, there's no evidence of this on The Walking Dead. Not to mention that viruses aren't known for animating corpses. There *are* instances of zombie-like afflictions in the insect world - a fungus that takes over a certain species of ant. A wasp that uses venom to take over the nervous system of a certain species of beetle. In neither case is the victim actually dead - their living bodies are shanghaied. Obviously, this is not what's happening on The Walking Dead - not given the rotting, flesh falling away animated corpses we see on the show.

So work with me here. I want to be educated. What the hell happened and is still happening in the world of The Walking Dead??

Spreading the Disease

by Allison Pang

By chance I found myself in the ER this week for about five hours. There's nothing quite like a hospital to make you feel like you're in a petri dish. No matter how much antiseptic is used, you're still surrounded by carriers. (And no matter how quick I hop in the shower when I get home, it's always a given I'll pick up SOMETHING while I'm there. If I'm lucky, it's just a cold. One time I went to get my lungs checked out and two days later ended up with a staph infection in my elbow that required some severely hardcore antibiotics to clear up. Go figure.)

Anyway, I was sitting there and waiting for my turn at the triage and noticed a young mother with a child maybe about 18 months. He was clearly not feeling well - terrible wheezing and running enough of a temp that the nurses actually brought him some liquid Tylenol. At one point a nurse came out to start some paperwork with the mom and was asking if the child was up-to-date on his shots.

The mom blithely replied he'd never been vaccinated.

I thought the nurse was going to implode on the spot, but I found myself watching this unfold and wondering if maybe I was at Ground Zero.

Not that I have much to worry about - I've been vaccinated, after all. But the "herd immunity" phrase that is so often touted in vaccine arguments does depend on the idea that everyone who can be vaccinated, should be - not only to prevent yourself from getting sick, but to protect those with compromised immune systems, the very young and the very old. (The theory being that if 90% of the herd is immune to a particular disease, the other 10% who can't be vaccinated will not be as likely to contract it, simply because the rest of the herd are not carriers.)

And I get that there was a study that came out declaring vaccinations cause autism and parents want to avoid that. Except that the guy who made that study has since backtracked and the study has been retracted. And now, we're learning that signs of autism are present in the womb. But people want answers, and it's easier to blame trace amounts of mercury, I guess. But the end result is that we've now got outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough that were nearly wiped out in North America decades ago.

That's really a sort of simplified explanation, of course, but it's one of my hot-button topics. Sort of like people using anti-bacterial soap all the time. It seems like a good idea, but biologically speaking, all you're doing is creating super-bugs. Evolution under a microscope, my friends - wipe out all the weak bacteria, and you're left with those few mutants who are hardier than their weak-willed friends. With a more narrow gene-pool to work with, guess what you're getting? The X-Men of the bacteria world, essentially. More immune to drugs and soaps and whatnot, so we become forced to use stronger drugs, which then starts the whole process over again.

Due to over-prescription of antibiotics, we now have diseases that can no longer be cured. Remember the "clap"? It was a lovely STD that could be treated with penicillin to the point that people didn't care all that much about getting it. Not anymore.

And don't get me started on the HPV vaccine. (I'm not actually going to touch it right now since the inherent misogyny that is used as an excuse not to give it to daughters makes my blood boil and I don't have time for that.)

*ahem*

Get vaccinated. Wash your hands. Use protection.

And listen to some Anthrax.

I Got a Disease...

Today's post comes with an earworm. Hey, we all know I'm generous like that.

You know what else likes to share and be shared? Communicable Diseases. 

Cough Cannonballs off port, Cap'in!  Snot Shots, Ahoy!

Any time you venture into public, particularly in the autumn, the dude with the cooties is guaranteed to invade your personal space -- especially if you take an elevator -- with a hacking, sneezing, sniffling fit. It doesn't matter where the spray is aimed -- hand, elbow, shoulder, petite flower standing in front of him -- everyone within ear shot feels the cooties latching on to them. The flu-in-the-elevator moment has been used by more than one horror novelist to pull back the curtain of civility and drop-kick the reader on the roller coaster of the world going to hell.

First comes Pestilence, then comes Plague, then comes Famine emptying the baby carriage...

Strangely enough, YouTube didn't have a video of elementary school kids singing that. Oh, don't look shocked. Children of a certain age are incredibly morbid and really like switching out words to get a rise out of the adults. Of course, when kids come back from Bible School with that particular ditty, I'm assured the newest generation will be as warped as mine. 

But, but, but what about the diseases that aren't contagious? The ones that are all about the individual's body giving them the royal Eff You out of the blue? For some authors, that's the launching point for revealing the paranormal. For other stories, it's a reason for the villain to be so dastardly or the hero to be so determined.

Disease: it's Goal, Motivation, and Conflict all in one. It has so many variants that it's endless fodder for fiction. It's so relateable, the average reader is ready to suspend disbelief and ride the story's crazy train.  

Yeah, I got a disease, and it's revealed on page 3.

Detecting Disease

Love the panorama function on my phone camera.


To find a way into something to say about this week's word, disease (I promise the "e's" get much happier), I played the XKCD game of throwing the word into Google for the top results.

Disease detectives? Yes, please!

There's something about that sort of investigative work that is relentlessly fascinating. Look at shows like House. Sure, Hugh Laurie played a fascinating character, but a huge part of what drew me back to episode after episode was the puzzle. The fact that this particular problem-solving exercise carries life or death drama makes it that much better.

Our bodies are mysteries in many ways. We don't understand what goes on inside them much of the time. In this way, they are black boxes - we can look at what goes in and study what results, but what goes on in between can be a mystery. Short of cutting the body open and taking a look - via surgery or withdrawing samples - the analysis become a logic problem.

In an interesting terminology distinction, the word "symptom" is used only for human beings, because they are capable of describing how they feel. Animals don't have symptoms. They have "signs." To play disease detective with an animal, you can't ask how they feel - you can only observe.

This has always struck me as funny because are we really that much better at self-analyzing? That little pain could be a random muscle twitch, a twinging nerve, an impinging tumor or a major infarction. Being who we are - with access to the internet - most of us race right to the Worst Thing Possible.

So, we rely on the specialists. The appliers of logic, the problem-solvers, to eliminate the improbable, focus on the possible and hope that it's solvable.

Now I want to write about a Disease Detective.