The Cold Death

The Cold Death is a horrible and mysterious disease. No one knows where it came from, they only know when it began to show up. First, it only effected small children who weren't properly protected from the winter winds. Then, it began to creep into the rest of the population, taking out the elderly first.
If you contract this disease, you won't know until your fingers start to tingle and constantly feel cold. Soon, the cold will creep into your arms and legs, and you will no longer be able to feel those limbs. Only a terrible, biting cold. No amount of blankets or fire water will help you warm up. Once you cannot feel your arms and legs, slowly, they will turn a dark shade of blue and freeze. After that, even the slightest touch will make them fall off and shatter like fragile glass.
When you are nothing but a torso and a head, the disease takes another route. It will change your hair color to a sickly white -almost transparent- and your features will grow pale and frost-like. If your head doesn't fall off and break into smithereens, your heart will be frozen in time.  Then the rest of you will turn to ice.
Bodies that have succumb to the cold will not decompose, nor will they melt. They are permanently a block of ice shaped sort of like a person. The only thing left to do is to either bury you and let you become a cold spot in the ground, or to break you into ice cubes for cooling drinks. However, it has been found that if people take the second option, they too will receive the disease.
The only known way to cure this disease is to drink a concoction known as Tazatorol. It's a reddish, rather viscous liquid that tastes like mud and sweetener. It is only accessible at an alchemist's shop, or specially requested from a skilled Flowerling . If you drink the medicine early on, then your chances of surviving the cold is higher than if you took the medicine after your limbs started falling off. However, if you do survive after taking it late in the cycle, whatever limbs you're missing will stay missing. And the rest of you will be very weak and prone to breaking.
Prevention of this disease is rather simple. When it's cold outside, secure your hands and feet in warm cloth, and take great care to keep yourself warm. Don't let any part of you come in contact with anything chilly during that time.
As easy as it is to prevent getting the cold, it's just as easy to catch it. All you have to do is touch someone who has it -whether that be their diseased bits, their broken off limbs, or even something they've touched- and tada! Now you've got the cold. It's been recommended to burn the clothing of the diseased; most often after they've passed. Do not share food or drink with the diseased. Give them food, of course, but don't let them touch yours. If you do, do this at your own risk.
Some people have been known to hold their freezing fingers over a fire, close enough to touch the flames. They may gain a bit of feeling back, but they will still be cold. Only now, they are cold and burned at the same time. This practice has faded after the beginning of the plague.

Transmission & Vectors

It is transmitted via touch. If the diseased touches someone, or something, the cold is now on that thing. The cold can stay on that thing for weeks if not properly treated. Also, it can be contracted through sharing drinking water, clothes, food, beds, etc.
When the fingers are tingly and have just begun to loose their feeling, the cold is most easily transmitted. It spreads like wildfire if the diseased touches anything at all during this stage.
After limbs start falling off, the infectious nature of this disease lessens substantially. The cold has stayed with that person, and it will stay with that person. During the time that appendages freeze and shatter, up until death the disease is not contagious. However, after death, it becomes even more infectious than it was before.

Symptoms

Tingling sensations in fingers and toes, numbness, a cough, extreme cold, frostbite, loss of limbs, death, and death-like symptoms. The brain loses the ability to think, and form words after the cold reaches the torso.

Treatment

The only known treatment is a medicine called Tazatorol. It's to be taken orally (just drink it), twice a day for three weeks (if you make it that long). Many blankets and warm fires help keep the cold at bay for a short while (in the beginning stages).
The medicine is rare, but easily made. However, the recipe is kept secret within the ranks of Flowerlings , and alchemists. Only the most skilled of these can concoct it properly. If done improperly, the result is an awful stomach ache and uncontrollable diarrhea.
You must go to an alchemist's shop to get a bottle of it, or find a knowledgeable Flowerling. During the Cold Plague of the late third age, the medicine was very expensive to get from an alchemist, but very easy to obtain from a Flowerling. Of course, back then you also had to find the Flowerling, which were in short stock because of said plague. After the plague, the price has declined to a very reasonable level.

Prognosis

First, you feel a tingling sensation in your fingers and toes. This is the earliest stage of noticeable symptoms. With the second stage -the frostbite stage- comes a slight cough and numbness in the outer extremities. Then a chill that cannot be warmed seeped into the body, causing the cough to worsen. This chill will eventually freeze the limbs and they will turn to ice and fall off. After this, comes the worse stage and is absolutely nonreversible. The cough turns nasty, and fits lasting up to five minutes will overshadow the shattering of all the limbs and the slow freezing of the head or heart. The only thing left is death.

Sequela

If you manage to survive this disease, your bone structure will forever be weakened. No matter how much milk you drink, your bones will be weak and very prone to fractures. Sometimes limbs will still fall off even after the cold is gone.
You can contract this disease even after you've been cured. There will always be a bit of it inside you, and it can flair up during extremely cold winters or it can come back full swing -and often much worse than it was before.

Affected Groups

Babies, very old people, people with injuries, people who often share their belongings and food with others, and people who touch others (often with the mouth, or other exposed areas).

Prevention

Wear gloves and socks and coats, and don't touch anything a diseased person has touched. Most likely, you will be fine.

Epidemiology

Bitter winters and improper warmth/nutrition causes the body to be vulnerable to catching the cold. Typically, it starts with small children, and then transmits to the elderly and circulates through the population until all that are left are a few healthy adults. Certain species are more prone to catching this disease than others, such as the Flowerlings. They don't wear clothing for most of the time (they don't need to, and say they don't enjoy it), and they share most things within their communities.

History

No one really knows when the first case of the cold showed up. What they do know, is that it suddenly spread like wildfire through communities around the world during the end of the third age. The fourth age began with a plague. This plague nearly wiped out the whole population of Flowerlings, and most other people.
After the creation of Tazatorol, things started to calm down. It took ten years for the cold to go away, and for repopulation to begin. In some areas, it took even longer.
Even after the plague was gone, there were still occasional outbreaks that happened after a bad blizzard or particularly cold night. Throughout the fourth age, communities all over the world fought the cold. Summers lessened the contractions, but there were still a few. Many of those who had it, had it for a very long time, and often gave it to others.
After twenty years or so, the cold dwindled to only a handfull of cases per year.

Cultural Reception

People are scared by this disease, and will lock themselves up in their homes to keep away from others -even if it means dying alone. Those who aren't affected will tend to stay away from the afflicted -some will even put their ill bretheren into a forced quarantine. Those with this disease are ostracized from society -or put out of their misery before nature has had a chance to take its course.
There are some, who don't heed this fear of the sick and will care for them. These folk -typically very loving family members or Flowerlings- are very brave, dedicated, and often contract the sickness themselves after a short time.

The first outcropping of this disease began in the third age, during the coldest winter in history. Only those who could not afford, or simply did not wear, the proper protective clothing caught it, but they soon passed it on to others.  After one particularly bad blizzard, it wasn't long before a whole town had contracted the cold. This outbreak lead to the Cold Plague which lasted many years before a desperate Flowerling found a cure.
This disease had become so common during that time, that folks had begun to refer to it as "the common cold." Today, whenever someone feels especially cold or tingly in the extremities, they say, "Oh, I might be catching the cold!" and proceed to the nearest alchemist for a bottle of Tazatorol.

Cycle

Chronic, Acquired

Rarity

Common