Looking for fatal infectious disease

[heleentje]

Setting: Unknown, but at least 300 years in the future. There are no hospitals or medical care available apart from what the characters can provide themselves. The characters are the last remaining human beings on the planet.

Terms searched: Infectious diseases, chicken pox, fatal diseases, SARS, immunization, transmission of diseases

I have

Comments

[mad_maudlin]

I think typhoid is the classic case of a disease where unsymptomatic carriers can infect others ("Typhoid Mary")...but given that this is 300 years in the future, you can get away with slight customization of an existing disease--just say that it evolved. Without medical infrastructure, after all, a lot more disease will rage unchecked, and the only people who survive them will be the ones who can develop immunity.

[heleentje]

Thanks! I think that's the best choice right now. I don't want to be very obvious about it, since it's a fairly minor part of the story, but I do want to know what I'm doing xD

[hourglasscreate]

Typhoid is the obvious choice.

But anything from the common cold on up would do.

[heleentje]

Going with typhoid, I believe. Thank you!

[sushidog]

If it's set 300 years in the future, pretty much any bacterial infection which is currently routinely treated with antibiotics will probably do the trick; we've already got MRSA which has evolved beyond antibiotics, so you can very easily introduce a resistant strain of something like staph or strep infections. Your character's immunity shouldn't be a major problem either; some people just are immune, either naturally or through some form of accidental inoculation (suffering cowpox makes you immune to small pox, or having a minor bout of something as a child can give you lifelong immunity. Bubonic plague springs to mind, but perhaps you don't want to use that one? There certainly were people with natural and acquired immunity, and it's highly infectious.

[heleentje]

I'm a bit wary about introducing new strains of anything, because even though it's very possible, I'm afraid it might come across too much as an asspull. Sadly, canon gives very little information about the circumstances the characters lived in (other than them being the last humans alive and the world being fully destroyed), but they did manage to create a working way to travel through time and set up all the necessary facilities to test it, so I find it hard to decide how far I can go with it.

[birdsedge]

Plain old influenza leading to pneumonia?

[mahasin]

Honestly, the flu. Swine flu, bird flu, any type of flu will do.