“Biology class was never this scary”
Back when I was still in that strange other-world known as the American suburban public high school, a microcosm of society that seems to exist within its own bubble and creates an experience unlike anything else, both for better and for worse, I was a science nerd. Nothing about that has changed, but what has changed is that my tastes have developed from childish science hobbies to aspirations of mapping bird migration. That’s neither here nor there; what I’m trying to say is that I was one of those kids that took tests on the weekend for fun. In other words, I was in Science Olympiad.
Science Olympiad is very much like how teen dramas imagine the math team to be; a bunch of smart kids plopped together in one room to answer a bunch of questions about arbitrary topics. It’s a little like brain Olympics, where each member competes in two or three events against other high schools, and these events range from building planes out of balsa wood to entering the nightmarish hellscape of ramshackle Rube Goldberg machines, and from things like basic forensic chemistry to identifying trees. But of all the many events to choose from, my favorite was always the disease one.
Disease Detectives, as it was oh-so-cleverly named, was an event where students were tasked with learning about history’s worst diseases, the science behind them, and how organizations like the WHO and the CDC track, understand, classify, and cure these diseases. It’s way more math than I ever expected it to be, and much less disease than I ever expected it to be, but there was something so very satisfying about figuring out that the infected dish at the imaginary school banquet was the salmon.
And as for other reasons I liked it so much, it probably helps that I did really, really well in this event, even better than in the bird event. At least once my partner and I got first place at the state level in our division, which was a pretty big deal. In fact, we took that test in the same room that I now cry in every from 2 to 3 every Tuesday and Thursday while my chem professor inhales sulfur hexafluoride and throws chemistry at us. As it was then, so it shall be now.
But even though I don’t want to pursue a career in epidemiology (or the study of disease pathogens and transmittance), my time with the event instilled in me a deep-seated wonder at those tiny organisms that can so readily destroy our bodies. I’m pretty into diseases, if only as a side piece, and I love learning more about the truth of them. Which is why I think The Hot Zone is one of my least favorite books ever, since it eschews science for sensationalism. And believe me, you don’t need sensationalism to make diseases scary. Forget Ebola. It doesn’t have the capacity to be truly virulent or world-ending. Let me show you some of the real scary diseases.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
More famously known as the human version of Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (or CJD for those in a hurry) is a member of a rare family of diseases that aren’t caused by bacteria, viruses, parasites, or fungi. Rather, it’s caused by an infected prion, or a misshapen protein. What makes prions particularly frightening is that it’s believed that they can turn other, healthy proteins into deformed killers just be touching them; the leading theory is that contact with protein contaminated with these prions is what leads to CJD. It’s almost like zombie proteins.
Most people don’t really think of the small causes of disease as scary, though. It’s the effects, the symptoms, that tend to be most frightening. And CJD definitely has that in spades, especially because there is no known method of curing this disease. There is no treatment. There is only delaying the inevitable. But what is the inevitable, in terms of this disease?
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease attacks the brain of infected individuals and basically rots it from the inside. And as hopefully everybody knows, we kind of need our brains to live. But CJD doesn’t care about that. CJD just consumes everything in its path, causing infected patients to slowly lose their memory, mental processes, and cognitive function until they waste away to thoughtless husks. It doesn’t turn them into mindless monsters, but it’s basically early-onset dementia. And you can get it by eating hamburgers.
Oh, yeah, I didn’t mention that part. It’s often contracted through infected ground beef. And no matter how much you cook it, you can’t make that meat safe to eat. I think it’s actually the reason why blood donation places asked you if you went to the UK in the 80’s and 90’s, because that’s where CJD may have first made the leap from cows to people. So next time you’re in London, maybe stick to the fish and chips and skip the burgers.
Oh, and one last thing that makes this disease ever more horrifying; it’s theorized that the first infected prions got misshapen because cows were regularly consuming the liquefied brains of their dead compatriots as part of their feed. That’s still going on today, and it’s just one of many reasons to hate CAFOs and think about going vegetarian. Oh, and a similar phenomenon happens in human cannibals. This rabbit hole just leads to Hell, folks. Get out while you can.
Rabies
Do you remember the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus Finch is asked by the townsfolk to shoot a rabid dog? And they all cower in their houses in complete and total fear, and they only trust Atticus to take out the dog because he’s the only one who can shoot it from a block away? That scene confused me, because I never thought of rabies as that big a deal. Sure, you get bit by a raccoon, you go to the hospital, get a shot, you’re fine. But it wasn’t always that way. That’s because without the rabies vaccine, getting bit is a practically-guaranteed death sentence.
Rabies is a virus specific to mammals that affects the nervous system, eventually reaching the brain through the nerves in your body. Initial symptoms are flu-like, but progress down a steadily darker path. These symptoms include hallucinations, agitation and confusion, insomnia, increased salivation, difficulty swallowing, and a fear of water. This is where we get the image of rabid animals; feral dogs or raccoons foam at the mouth because of the hypersalivation. But by the time that starts, it’s already too late.
The terrifying thing about rabies is that it has one of the highest mortality rates of any disease known to man. It’s deadlier than cancer, ebola, and any other disease making headlines. There’s only three recorded cases of someone surviving rabies without modern treatment, meaning that the mortality rate of rabies is close to 100%. Bullets aren’t even that effective.
Of course, the reason you never hear about people dying of rabies is because it’s actually very difficult to get in developed countries. This is thanks in part to animal control services but mostly due to rabies long incubation period. Once you get bit, you aren’t actually infected for about a month or so. In that time, the virus just chills in your nervous system while it gains power. That’s the flaw in its design; it takes so long to develop. And in that time, if you get a series of cheap, painless vaccines, you’re almost completely protected against the virus. That 100% chance of death drops to almost 0% chance of death thanks to modern medicine.
Back in the day, though, without those vaccines, anyone bitten by a rabid animal would have about a month or so left to live before their brain shits itself out their ears. Once the symptoms show, it’s only a matter of days before you’re dead, which is why prevention is so important when vaccines aren’t around. But that makes it a pretty big issue in developing countries or places where vaccines aren’t so easy to get. People still die of rabies all the time. Just not in the rich countries. Which is something we’ll see again in a few paragraphs, actually…
Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva
Personally, out of everything on this list, I think this disease freaks me out the most. But, ironically, it’s also the safest disease on here, since it isn’t contagious and it’s technically a genetic condition, and not an infectious disease. But it’s also one of the most horrifying genetic diseases that I’ve ever heard of and sounds like something out of a horror novel. Or Game of Thrones. Yes, this is a disease that slowly turns your entire body into bone.
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva is believed to be a mutation of the body’s repair functions because it causes your own body to turn against you and transform one set of organs into another, like stem cells gone haywire. It very literally “repairs” damaged tissues, usually muscles, tendons, and ligaments, by replacing damaged areas not with new tissue but with bone. Sprained your muscle? Sorry, that’s bone now. You can’t move your leg. Got a bruise on your ribs? Hope you like having a solid plate of bone for a chest. Like running? I sure hope you don’t.
It’s incredibly rare, and there’s only been about 800 confirmed cases total. But it’s a horrifying thought, and the implications of it are even worse. At one point, attempts were made to surgically remove the unnatural bone growths, but this had the opposite effect; removed areas were healed by growing more bone, like a skeletal hydra of human suffering. Cut one head off and it ossifies into two more.
Perhaps the worst part isn’t that the estimated lifespan is only 40 years, but that patients suffering from the disease may spend their last years frozen in one position. To quote Wikipedia, which accidentally made their description existentially dreadful, “Adult patients eventually have to decide on what position they wish to predominantly take for the rest of their lives.” Hot damn. I can’t even choose what I want for dinner, let alone how I want my body to be positioned for every remaining second of my life.
Oh, and on one final note, it’s usually misdiagnosed as other muscular conditions, like fibrosis. Sometimes physicians will ask for biopsies if they think it’s cancer related. But, as we learned, this surgery just makes the disease angry, and the cycle goes on.
Malaria
Think of every war, ever. World War One. World War Two. The Thirty Years War. Vietnam. Korea. Iraq. The Emu War. Think of every major disaster, ever. Pompeii. Hurricane Katrina. Mt. St. Helens. The 2004 Indian Tsunami. The San Francisco Fire. The 2010 Haiti earthquake. The 2012 Yellowstone eruption. Think of every major act of violence, ever. The Holocaust. 9/11. The Rwandan Genocide. The Cambodian killing fields. The Great Purge. The Trail of Tears. Thanos’s snap. Think of every major accident, major health risk, major revolution, major anything that’s ever killed anyone, ever. Now add them all together. That’s still less people than Malaria has killed.
Because humanity has been around for a hot minute now, it’s estimated that there have been, in total, about 100 billion people, give or take a few billion. I’m not clear if this includes the currently existing 7 billion, but it doesn’t really matter, because some scientists postulate that malaria is responsible for more than half of every human death in history. Some estimates think that maybe even close to 75% of all people, ever, have kicked the bucket because of this disease, though not everyone agrees with this assessment. But we don’t even think about it in the United States.
Malaria is cause by a parasite which gets transported from host to host via the Ubers and lyfts of the disease world; mosquitoes. It causes flu-like symptoms, but when it infects children, it can leave them physically or developmentally stunted. But in adults, it isn’t that dangerous of a disease, in the sense that it’s pretty survivable with prevention and medical treatment. But when you factor in the location of the disease, it gets more complicated.
Malaria’s generally seen as being a disease of poverty, since it predominantly affects equatorial regions, most of which happen to be heavily impoverished. These poverty-stricken regions tend to the be least developed, and therefore the people there have the least access to proper medicines, medical treatment, or preventative measures. So that’s why Africa bears 92% of the world’s malaria burden with more than 200 million cases continent-wide, whereas the US sees less than 20,000 malaria cases annually.
We almost had Malaria under control after World War II, thanks to my least favorite double D, Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. Yeah, the one that kills bald eagles. It’s a complicated political and environmental situation, but after World War II and the advent of industrial pesticides, malaria levels were at the lowest they’d ever been. But once the support of DDT usage in malaria-prone countries dropped, we started to see a massive spike in cases that’s continued to this day. And the bugs are becoming resistant, too. So we don’t have that chance again.
We in American tend not to think of malaria as being that big of a deal, mostly because it doesn’t affect us. But it the thought of the deadliest thing in the world isn’t frightening, maybe this is; malaria mosquitoes are getting more aggressive. Thanks to climate change, the ecosystems in which malaria-carrying mosquitoes can live is expanding, and with warmer winters, there are fewer mosquito-killing frosts. It’s estimated that in the next few decades, vast swaths of the southern United States could be more malaria-prone. Of course, it was like this once before. But climate change and pesticide resistance has the possibility of making everything worse. The way things are going, there’s a slim chance malaria might not be a disease of poverty much longer. But the very least, it’s still one of the greatest threat to human health and equatorial development.
And if that isn’t the scariest thing you’ve learned today, I’ll eat my mosquito netting.
Fascinating & terrifying at the same time….