Comments on: Quick Quiz: Comic Book Diseases

By: Tamrae

Tamrae — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:53:28 +0000

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.

By: Donut

Donut — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 08:08:28 +0000

Good god. The Grazer is real.

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

By: M

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 15:34:11 +0000

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.

By: Ragnell

Ragnell — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 23:44:01 +0000

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

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:00:23 +0000

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.

By: M

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 17:40:20 +0000

>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.

By: Chuck T.

Chuck T. — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:33:09 +0000

I missed vaccinia. It sounded fake!

By: lilacsigil

lilacsigil — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:43:47 +0000

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

By: Dwight Williams

Dwight Williams — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:42:18 +0000

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.