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Comment by mxcrossb | Hacker News Reader

So, I don’t believe in karma, but man that is something. I wonder if deep in his subconscious he knew he had the disease, and was acting rebellious.

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It would be interesting if the disease caused the host to be inclined to spread it.

Colds make people more social I've heard, so doing that would be plausible.

There's only a few studies on this I could find via some google & google scholar:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...

https://evesdrift.com/2014/01/01/change-in-human-social-beha...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1349985915923183693...

Syphillis does that. Lowers the hosts inhibitions and increases their risk seeking behaviour.

There's a parasitic fungus that does this with insects. It takes over, compelling the host to move to a location where the fungus can reproduce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vijGdWn5-h8

This is also the plot hook for The Last of Us, a superbly-crafted game for the PS3/4.

And soon to be HBO show! [1]

[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/the-last-of-us-hbo-tv-show

Fantastic! Thanks for letting me know!

I'm assuming you mean beyond inducing the host to aerosolize infectious fluids via sneezing and coughing.

Here's a fun fact: Toxoplasma gondii causes rats to like cats (feces) instead of fearing them, making them prone to being eaten by cats - which is great for the parasite as it reproduces in cat's alimentary system. Incidentally, humans with Toxoplasmosis are over-represented in traffic accidents, which may suggests some of that recklessness effect carries over.

Like rabies?

This was in the story "saviour of the plague years" in a 1995 Wired magazine futurist fiction compilation. They called the desire to run around and spread the disease the "Hong Kong Jog."

The guinea worm spreads via drinking egg-infested water. When the parasite becomes fully developed in the human body, it migrates to the skin where it causes blisters accompanied by burning pain. The pain induces the host to immerse the boil in water; immediately relieving the pain - and allowing the parasite to release its eggs for the next host to drink.

I think this kind of behavior does increase your risk of getting the disease, but I imagine there's a strong selection bias.

People that don't do this, won't have a viral moment when it's announced that they have the disease. People that do this kind of thing can have a viral moment when it's announced.

Or it's possible that's where he contracted it.

He is showing symptoms too quickly to have gotten it from that, but he certainly could have been spreading it.

I would be a little hesitant when making that claim. It would certainly be a shorter than usual incubation period, but I don't know how many sigmas away from the mean it would be.

Three days is considered the minimum to be symptomatic.

It's possible, of course -- maybe very high activity accelerated the timeline -- but he spends his days around hundreds of people, and then occasionally tens of thousands of people. Just walking out of the tunnel he is under the respiratory cloud of hundreds of people.

It seems deeply improbable that this event was the cause, not least because the timeline isn't among the probable set.

Oh, sure, I'm very happy to agree with the claim that it's very unlikely that he got the virus from this event. I wasn't trying to dispute that.

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