Question on VITAS Options

[FXcalibur]

Hmm? I never thought of it that way... What if theoretically your immune system was down or ceased to function, such as if you had AIDS?

[mfb]

i'm not sure i understand the question. if your immune system shuts down, as if you had AIDS, you'd die the same way people with AIDS eventually die: you'd catch a cold, never get over it, and keel over.

[Kagetenshi]

I think he's asking what would happen if you had advanced AIDS and caught VITAS.

Which is an interesting question, but you'd be dead soon regardless of the answer.

~J

[FXcalibur]

EDIT: Kage beat me to it.

[BitBasher]

Ironically, I think by it's nature VITAS may kill the AIDS virus..

[Herald of Verjig...]

If there is a single cell to produce more white blood cells, VITAS would probably win out as the more potent disease. It may even be a lab mistake from the research that led to the cure for AIDS. Or an intentional variation of the same.

[SirKodiak]

[Otaku On Acid]

Virally Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome. At least from my perspective it would seem that VITAS would make you deathly allergic to the toxins, aka pollution, already present in the enviroment, but that your body is able to tolerate. This would explain why it killed mostly the poor and was so deadly in more polluted cities such as Mexico City. The one flaw to this theory is that supposedly VITAS killed both rich and poor, but if a wealthy person caught VITAS, according to my interpration a wealthy person could just flee to a wilderness or a corporate clean enviroment and survive. On the other hand maybe allergy VITAS would be so severe that no where on modern earth would be clean enough to allow a human to survive, or perhaps it would have enough to act on the pollutants already present in the victim before they became infected

[Kagetenshi]

If it just reacts to allergens, treatment would be (relatively) inexpensive; a clean room and a decontamination shower.

If the immune system doesn't need a trigger other than the virus, you'd treat with boatloads of immunosuppressive drugs. Like what they do after organ transplants, for instance, but much more so. Still in a clean room, since while you're being treated you might as well have advanced (if temporary) AIDS.

~J

[Jason Farlander]

[Kagetenshi]

Then the aforementioned drug treatments instead of the clean room and decon shower.

I still like the idea of the virus sending the immune system berserk without needing anything else, but that could just be me.

~J

[Pinel]

You can combine both views. Perhaps VITAS victims die from their immune system going into overdrive at the cellular level, but the sequence has to be triggered by common allergens or certain substances (with each patient having different "neutral" substances). Decontamination or drugs wouldn't help as they only act on the catalyst, and what is killing you is the rioting of your cells. This would explain the long painful death, which sounds similar to what Ebola victims have to endure - there are graphic descriptions of what Ebola does to the human body in one of the Tom Clancy novels (Executive Orders I think).

In theory you could still survive VITAS if you were placed permanently in a sterilized environment before any allergens ruined your day (Bubble Boy, anyone ?). It would make for a challenging run to extract a VITAS-infected researcher or millionaire from a sterilized facility - without killing the target or the runners.