Quick Quiz: Comic Book Diseases

April 6th, 2006

Filed under: Comics, Medicine

Here’s an easy one. All of the following diseases have been mentioned in mainstream comic books. How many of them are real diseases, and how many are fictional? Answers are hidden in the normal way; just highlight with you cursor to reveal.

Necrotizing fasciitis REAL - the basis of the plague in the Red Rain Avengers storyline
Sakutia FICTIONAL - the tropical disease caught by Garth Logan after he was bit by a green monkey
Chagas Disease REAL - the disease that killed Dr. Mid-Nite’s mother
Virus X FICTIONAL - the germ that causes Kryptonian Leprosy
Vaccinia REAL - the virus used to vaccinate against smallpox
Grazer FICTIONAL - one of the futuristic diseases from Transmetropolitan
Camelpox REAL - a virus that causes diseases in camels
Mugre FICTIONAL - A tropical disease that Batman and the new Tarantula confront
S.T.O.R.M.S. FICTIONAL - from Top Ten
Typhus REAL - An infectious disease contracted from fleas. A diferent disease entirely from typhoid.
Clench FICTIONAL - The ebola-like virus that caused an epidemic in the Batman: Contagion storyline.
Murray Valley Encephalitis REAL - A rare mosquito-borne viral disease from Australia.

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9 Responses to “ Quick Quiz: Comic Book Diseases ”

  1. Dwight Williams
    April 7th, 2006 at 3:42 am

    Odd. The way Sakutia had been described in several books, it seemed as though at least Marv Wolfman noticed that its behaviour accidentally mapped on one very notorious real-world virus. Check out the description in Changeling’s Who’s Who “three-ring-binder edition” profile.

  2. lilacsigil
    April 7th, 2006 at 3:43 am

    http://www.afro.who.int/press/2004/noma.html for the grazer in real life.

  3. Chuck T.
    April 7th, 2006 at 7:33 am

    I missed vaccinia. It sounded fake!

  4. M
    April 7th, 2006 at 11:40 am

    >Chagas Disease — REAL - the disease that killed Dr. Mid-Nite’s mother.

    Just strikes me as amusing. It’s a real disease but the example given is fictional.

    vaccinia - Jenner’s beautiful baby, a domesticated pox virus related to cow pox and smallpox (and distantly camel pox I think, but not chicken pox which is actually in the herpe virus family.) Vaccinia derived from a latin word for cow, although it turns out that modern vaccinia isn’t really cowpox after all, origin of the terms vaccine and vaccinate.

  5. Scott
    April 7th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
    Official Comment

    I was originally going to list where every real disease I listed appeared in the comics, but I wound up doing that just for necrotizing fasciitis and chagas.

    The Chagas disease reference always struck me as strange — IIRC, it was from JSA - All Star #6 (or whichever one was about Mid-Nite). There are many diseases that a comic reader could relate to better instead of a rather obscure disease from south of the border.

  6. Ragnell
    April 7th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

    The only one I got right was STORMS, Vaccinia sounded fake to me too.

  7. M
    April 8th, 2006 at 9:34 am

    Vaccinia probably ’sounds fake’ to so many because it’s the kind of old school name that many bio-medical technobabble names emulated. Latinesque and all.

  8. Donut
    April 23rd, 2006 at 3:08 am

    Good god. The Grazer is real.

    That….scares me more than just about anything else I’ve ever read.

  9. Tamrae
    October 6th, 2006 at 10:53 am

    I was hoping sakutia was a real disease. I planned to do a report on it, but I’ll settle for the Grazer. That is pretty scary.

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