Desert Chill

The deserts of Lezoru contain many strange things. One of the strangest is the Desert Chill, a peculiar virus that spreads like wildfire and can leave devastation in its wake.

This devastation is not that of death, precisely. This is usually an eventual result, of course, because of the changes wrought, but most people infected with the disease survive it.

This is probably part of how it becomes an epidemic, in that it spreads from those recovered because their living bodies carry the still living virus.

It starts with a deep, bone-aching chill. The infected eventually deals with numbness and an extremely low body temperature. Going along with this, they will suffer a variety of symptoms that include lethargy, aching joints, brain fog, and shivering.

Unless the person suffers from a handful of conditions that would exacerbate this low temperature, or undergo poor quality of care, they are likely to survive this.

Because they survive, they pass the disease on easily, as its period of contagion is a long one. When one person catches the Desert Chill, you can be fairly certain that most of the people in their community will also catch it.

Secondary Effects Worse Than the Primary

Since the disease is readily survivable, the difficulty comes from three different sources.

First, the widespread loss of productivity across all levels of the infected community. Since it hits so broadly, if an epidemic comes at a bad time then whole harvests can be lost, and similar disasters.

Second, it has been known to spread to other species, including plants and livestock, sometimes to devastating effect. For obvious reasons, most plants do poorly under extremely cold conditions.

The third reason is that the virus changes fairly quickly and if an outbreak lasts long enough, some of the initial infected might become sick again. They usually recover more quickly, but it's not pleasant, and makes point one even worse.