Fictional diseases

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

This article is a list of fictional diseases — nonexistent, named medical conditions which appear in fiction where they have a major plot or thematic importance. They may be fictional psychological disorders, magical, from mythological or fantasy settings, have evolved naturally, been engineered artificially (most often created as biological weapons), or be any illness that came forth from the (ab)use of technology.

Read more »

Polio

Though it's been around since ancient times, polio, which targets the nervous system, only rose to epidemic proportions in the 20th century, perhaps because increased population density facilitated its transmission.

At its worst, polio was serious business: some patients were left with life-long limb paralysis or deformities, while an even unluckier few found their respiratory muscles paralyzed and were left dependent upon coffin-like iron lungs for their survival. Many eventually died. Amazingly, up to 95 percent of people infected with polio showed no symptoms, and most others just faced your standard flu-like fare … but those numbers can be misleading.

At the height of the polio epidemic in the 1950s, there were over 13,000 cases involving paralysis and 1,000 deaths each year from the disease, many of them children.

Thanks to a large-scale vaccination campaign, polio is no longer a problem in most of the world, but remains endemic in parts of India, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Source; http://science.discovery.com/life-earth-science/10-infectious-diseases.htm

Read more »

Elephantiasis

It turns out that the famous "Elephant Man" did not, in fact, actually have elephantiasis, the disease characterized by acute swelling of the limbs and caused most often by a parasitic worm transmitted by mosquitoes.

What the elephant man did have was some of the classic elephantiasis symptoms, and those aren't pretty. In fact, they're pretty ugly.

The parasitic worms that cause elephantiasis hang out in the lymph system, which controls the immune response and fluid retention — hence the swelling. That swelling most often occurs in the legs, but it can also affect the arms, breasts or even the genitals, causing them to swell and deform to enormous sizes.

Don't get the wrong idea, guys: in men, the scrotum can swell so much that the penis can retract inside the swollen, thickened skin. Now, that just sounds unpleasant.

Read more »

Botulism

For something that women cheerfully inject into their foreheads every day, botulism neurotoxin (BT) sure is scary.

BT is the handiwork of the common soil bacteria Clostridium botulinum. The bacteria can be spread through food contaminated with the bacteria or its spores, or through an open wound.

Once in the body, the bacteria start producing the toxin and things get messy. Within a day or two, neurological symptoms appear, including slurred speech, blurred vision and trouble breathing. Muscles get weaker, reflexes stop working, limbs get paralyzed.

Eventually, the diaphragm and other breathing muscles stop working, causing death. Antitoxin and antibiotics can halt the disease's progress, if administered in time, but it can take months to fully recover from the paralysis.

Source; http://science.discovery.com/life-earth-science/10-infectious-diseases.htm

Read more »

Leprosy

Lepers (and leprosy) have been around since biblical times; so has the stigma against them.

For centuries, the disease was believed to be a curse. Stories abounded about the terrifying symptoms: skin lesions turn to dying flesh and into fallen limbs.

Yes, that's right. Your leg might just fall off. Eek!

Suddenly, those leper colonies make a lot more sense. In reality, leprosy doesn't actually cause limbs to drop left and right.

The disease, also known as Hansen's disease, is caused by Mycobacterium leprae, a bacteria that infects the peripheral nerves. Without functioning nerves to feel pain and temperature, patients can often inadvertently injure themselves and opportunistic infections can take hold, sometimes leading to the loss of a finger or toe (hence, the fallen limb rumors).

It's not a highly infectious disease, but can spread in areas with poor hygiene and close living conditions. Things changed a lot for lepers in the 1950s with the rise of antibiotics such as dapsone.

Today, we treat it with a multi-drug regimen and, though colonies still exist, far fewer people lose life or limb to the disease.

Read more »

Mad-Cow Disease

Mad-cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (the spongiform is for sponge, as in "this disease will chew holes in your brain until it looks like a sponge"), first came to the public's attention in the mid-1990s, when the illness, caused by deformed protein fragments called prions, made the jump from cows to humans.

Known in humans as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the illness is spread through contaminated meat and causes a host of awful degenerative neurological symptoms, including dementia, loss of nervous system and muscle control, and eventually, death.

And as if the idea of your brain slowly turning to Swiss cheese isn't gross enough, its path to prominence is also disgusting.

The dangerous prion spread to outbreak proportions due to the then-common cannibalistic practice of feeding diseased cattle remains (including bone and brain, complete with BSE prions) to other cattle, which were then consumed by humans. Now, that's just wrong.

Read more »

Naegleria (brain-eating amoeba)

Don't drink the water. And while you're at it, you might not want to take any chances by putting your head in it, either.

Naegleria fowleri, a not-so-friendly little amoeba, makes its home in warm fresh water in the American Southwest. That's not such a problem, but it occasionally also likes to make its home in people's brains, which is a bit of a problem.

The amoeba usually creeps through your nose while you swim in lakes or hot springs. Once it finds its way up into your brain, it's pretty much over. The seizures start, followed by a coma.

The parasitic amoeba chews through your brain matter, and since you kind of need your brain to live, that means it's curtains for both you and your parasitic, opportunistic amoeba friends.

Read more »