I’m toying with a science fiction concept that relies on a nasty disease as a plot device. This disease has these characteristics:
sexually transmitted
victim gets a slight fever over a period of two or more weeks
female victims are permanently sterilized
My question is, what would medical doctors call this disease? And what acronym would they associate with it? And what would the general public call it?
If this disease were airborne instead of sexually transmitted, would these names be any different?
This sounds a lot like The White Plague by Frank Herbert, except the disease was transmitted by mere skin contact and it was fatal to females. The common name that the non-scientist characters used for the disease was the book’s title.
It sounds like you’re using a similar idea that I’ve been toying with for a couple of years for a story that so far only resides in my head. I’m not planning on going any further with it so if you’d like to email me I’d be glad to share.
[nitpick]
Kaposi was the doctor (a dermatologist IIRC) who first described the disease that now bears his name. Likewise, Thomas Hodgkin was the English physician who first described the now eponymic cancer of the lymphoid tissue.[/nitpick]
Almost no diseases are named after patients. Lou Gehrig’s disease is an anomaly due to the fact that he was so well known, and the name just stuck. ALS was well known long before that. I believe there are only two or three named after patients, one being Christmas disease, the other I can’t recall. If someone wants to wade through www.whonamedit.com they can probably find a few more, but in 99.9% of the cases the doctor grabs the fame, not the patient.
Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks became hugely distended when he played his horn. This condition was unusual outside the glass-blowing profession. When a researcher asked to study Diz’s cheeks, he agreed only if it were renamed after him. Now, the condition (which I believe had been known as glassblower’s pouches) is called Gillespie’s pouches.
This is rare. As you now know, top billing usually goes to the researcher.
Once in a while, the same person identifies two diseases and tacks his name on both. There are two diseases of the breast named for Padgett; one of them is benign, the other is malignant. My mother-in-law had the misfortune of being diagnosed with the benign one, when in fact she had the other one.
Actually, I am toying with the idea that the (world) government has deliberately developed a disease that makes women infertile in order to combat overpopulation. The government has a “cure” that lets a woman become pregnant, once, upon application, screening, and approval. Sort of a eugenics program. (I stole the idea from Larry Niven, of course.)
Anyway, the story’s crisis is that the disease has mutated, gone air-borne, and sterilized 99% of the world’s population. The question is, what effects would this have on society?
I am not familiar with chlamydia. What are its symptoms?