Auroral Fever

This disease is so new that it hasn't been given an official name yet. It's referred to simply as "the fever". I'm calling it the auroral fever because it is directly related to color vision, which this culture associates with auroras.

Transmission & Vectors

Like any other viral disease, it is transmitted through contact with bodily fluid: sweat, coughs, mucus, blood, etc. Doctors say that the disease is airborne, but that's not entirely true, since some households have members that the fever passes over. (More often than not, these are color-sighted people.)

Symptoms

High fever, nausea, and temporary blindness

Treatment

Home remedies and medicinal herbs can treat the fever and nausea. Nothing has been found to prevent the blindness nor shorten the duration.

Prognosis

The elderly, young children, and the sickly are not likely to survive. Healthy teens and adults spend around 3 weeks bedridden, but usually make a full recovery by 5-6 weeks.

Sequela

Those without the color vision gene experience no complications. However, carriers of the color vision gene report permanently altered perception. The virus' DNA, introduced during the infection, is enough to activate the recessive gene and the intact mechanisms in the eyes and brain. It's quite disorienting -- more so since their families don't understand how and why their loved one is "seeing things." Interrogations by priests don't help either.

Hosts & Carriers

There have been no confirmed cases among Auroral Humans. Yet the Order of the Eye has observed some troubling patterns between members' movements and new waves of the epidemic. Could they be asymptomatic carriers of the virus?

Prevention

Theoretically, washing hands often, covering coughs, and doctors taking precautions to avoid contact with the patient's bodily fluids would stop this disease from reaching epidemic levels. (The sorts of things that people are advised to do in real life to prevent colds, the flu, and other similar diseases.) Doctors do impose quarantines on infected houses and neighborhoods, but their medical science hasn't discovered viruses yet. (They don't even know about bacteria.) So the quarantines don't do much to slow the spread of the fever.

Cultural Reception

The church is worried about the lasting complications people are reporting. They haven't diagnosed it as "auroral madness". Yet.

Type

Viral

Affected Species

• Nocturnal Humans