[ANON POST] Epidemic To Order

[orange_fell]

Searched: pneumonia and flu epidemic, found lots of stuff on the Spanish Flu in 1918, but it's not quite relevant to what I'm looking for

Comments

[conuly]

Strep throat, aka "scarlet fever". It's very common even today among children, so lots of people are intimately familiar with the symptoms, and most people know that scarlet fever was a big killer in the past. It's a bacterial illness, so you can get it again and again, too.

As for what they'd do, that depends on whether their knowledge is more medical or historical. If the first, same as any other disease - hydrate, try to keep a fever down, try to keep the infected away from the healthy as much as possible. If the latter, they may attempt to control the infection by destroying anything the infected had touched or used. This is pointless.

[witchofnovember]

Scarlet fever is actually a sequelae to strep throat. You get the sore throat, then as you start to feel better your chest and throat (outside this time) turn bright read and your fever heads back up. It doesn't happen all the time. I've had several cases of strep but never had scarlet fever, my sister got it twice.

[silentg_canada]

Cholera. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%9313_Haiti_cholera_outbreak

[marycatelli]

That's what I thought of too.

You can treat it with Oral Rehydration Therapy. An old approximation was to give the victim water with sea salt and molasses, which might indeed help.

[conuly]

Even just plain water will work, though it must be boiled and clean.

[marycatelli]

Really? I would have thought there was danger of electrolyte imbalance.

[pocketmouse]

Measles or mumps. The anti-vaccine crowd has raised the number of cases already, and without vaccines at all the numbers would only go up. Depending on how recent your apocalypse was, older people might remember it/have had it.

[pocketmouse]

The apocalypse is limited in scale and they've been underground for three years, so the generation that's around now would have been vaccinated long before Jenny McCarthy began her misinformation campaign. Very small children wouldn't have been, obviously, but there aren't many of those, and I'm not sure if that's enough to start an epidemic.

[sashatwen]

How about the plain old flu? Flu epidemics have been big killers in the past and peoplein western countries still die from it. A real flu epidemic can decimate malnourished populations pretty thoroughly.

[sollersuk]

My thought exactly - the scenario reads as if it was written for it.

[sashatwen]

That's the scenario I was envisioning (the more mundane, the better, because the idea is "we could easily prevent this except we can't"); just trying to figure out how realistic it is.

[marycatelli]

You don't want the Spanish Flu then, that was a real killer. Just an ordinary flu. (Especially since that one killed the healthy adults disproportionately, whereas ordinary ones tend to kill the children and aged.

[tarvae]

Yup. Agreed good old flu or maybe norovirus or another gastric type problem. Is easy enough for people to die from dehydration etc if not treated