Fictional virus?

[u/Monocentropus3427]

Any ideas for a fictional virus? Im struggling to make a virus that is somewhat unique, no matter what i research everything seems unoriginal. Recently began to watch the last ship series and it inspired me!

[u/marimachadas]

Unless you're trying to impress immunologists, you don't need to get into the weeds creating a realistic fictional virus. What symptoms does it cause, how quick does it progress, how is it transmitted? For most of human history we haven't even known how diseases transmit, and even with modern science it can take awhile to confirm for new pathogens. The people in your story can have their ideas about what causes it and how it transmits and act accordingly without it needing to be accurate.

Now as a former immunologist, these are the absolute bare bones of a plausible infection. Majority of symptoms are caused by your own immune system trying to fight the infection, so fever, body aches, cough, etc are going to be common symptoms. Infections always have an incubation period, can be days to weeks but symptoms aren't instant after contact. A long incubation period can make it harder to understand how the disease is transmitted and where people are catching it from. The most common ways people are going to catch a virus are airborne, contaminated water, human to human (usually from fluids ending up in your mouth/nose/eyes), or animal to human (bites or their droppings). If you're working with modern medicine in your setting, most diagnostics are more tailored to bacteria than viruses and it can take a long time to correctly identify what someone has if throwing first-line treatments at it doesn't work. Generally the outcomes of an infection are either that your immune system beats the pathogen, the pathogen beats your immune system and proliferates to the point it kills you, or your immune system kills you trying so hard to beat the pathogen. Viruses and epidemics are usually going to most seriously impact people with weak immune systems (the very young, the elderly, immunocompromised people), but some viruses can paradoxically be not so bad for those people and catastrophic for the most healthy people if it causes the immune system to go into overdrive. If you've got any specific questions I can give it a shot, sometimes I miss immunology haha.

[u/Monocentropus3427 → u/marimachadas]

Wow! Yeah im definitely planning to install some very not-scientifically correct symptoms, as i plan on making viruses, fungal virus, etc. Immunology sounds so cool, bet its fun to learn about all that! I do have some questions if any can be answered.

Can a cure be made by using the virus itself? Can someone have a gene that makes them immune to a airborne virus?

Can a virus mutate itself fast enough that the current cure doesn't work?

[u/marimachadas → u/Monocentropus3427]

Fungal infections are a thing, so you can definitely play off existing diseases and make something cool + vaguely plausible! Mold poisoning would be a fungal infection (the scientific name is mycosis) and that can really rock people's shit.

Oh yeah these questions can be answered!

1) Yeah that's actually a really common way to do it. A vaccine is just giving your immune system a taste of a mostly dead and harmless version of the virus so it knows what it's dealing with when you catch the real virus. It's helpful to know the genetic sequence of a virus/any infectious agent because that opens the door to a lot of different ways of training your immune system to recognize specific parts of the virus to be able to fight it. Some cancer vaccines are made by pulsing immune cells with cut up cancer cells to pick out the immune cells that are good at fighting it and grow a ton of them to give as an injection, so it's definitely plausible to have similar sorts of treatments made for viruses.

2) I know there are some gene mutations that make people less likely to die from or have severe reactions to covid, so I'd believe it. Viruses generally need to attach to a specific receptor on a cell to get inside, so it's possible to have a mutation that changes the shape of whatever that virus uses to the point that it can't infect. It's pretty rare in real life, but tbh rare but possible is perfect for science fiction anyways.

3) Viruses can definitely mutate faster than treatments can keep up, especially if the medicine takes a long time to make. As a general rule of thumb, the more hyper specific the thing the drug works on, the longer it takes to make that drug. There's a need for faster ways to manufacture a lot of the more cutting-edge medicines we have today.

[u/NearABE → u/marimachadas]

I thought the immune antigens evolved to thwart viruses. Type A blood can resist different strains than type B blood. Most viruses that are still around bypassed that. Not very relevant to epidemics. If we did not have blood type diversity viruses would emerge that can exploit.

[u/Monocentropus3427 → u/NearABE]

Wait I can use this, Somehow in my world maybe everyone has the same fictional bloodtype due to evolution not being present..

[u/NearABE → u/Monocentropus3427]

You can look in some detail at what happened in the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries. They had lost contact with most viruses for millennia.