I had a thought...

[goodbyebird]

A story idea popped into my head: Andy hasn't had the flu for thousands of years! Andy gets the flu!! :DD Nile to the rescue with chicken soup, etc!!! PROFIT.

But hold up. The crew was drugged at the lab, and it seemed to take hold as it would with anyone else. Plus Booker is shown to be filthy drunk at the end of the movie. This contrasts with how they can be shot multiple times, and keep going. It doesn't seem to take a death for the process to kick in.

Now. How many times have they all died from various flues and plagues? Do they even catch them? If they caught it once, does their body now have antibodies? Or is all of that reversed alongside the healing process once death kicks in?

Not even gonna think about all those samples left behind in the lab with the morally bankrupt doctor Kozak. Because that's how you get zombies, or ten fun old plagues having a comeback.

(100% handwaving how their hair grows back, but only to their current haircut, and how Quynh had air bubbles whenever she re-awoke in the coffin. ~movie logic~)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I have wondered about this! A lot of getting taken down by a bullet is physical shock and trauma, so it makes sense that they're so used to it that they just keep going while they heal up (short of, say, having a limb shot off). Drugs and alcohol are poisoning, so while their liver and kidneys will process things, they may not be any faster than a normal person's. So I think in general disease would be less likely to kill them because their bodies will just keep healing and not eventually get overwhelmed - this is why most diseases kill more elderly and very young than healthy adults, because the healthy adults are best at fighting disease. Some diseases like cholera might still do it because that's basically death by severe dehydration.

And they would have so. many. antibodies. Diseases tend to change over time, so their antibodies would slowly get outdated (faster with things like influenza) but humans due become immune to most diseases once infected, and they don't seem to reset their level of tan (sun damage) when they resurrect! It's interesting to think how different they would be to modern populations in their home area, though - Andy is older than the lactase persistence mutation! Joe and Nicky are older than the Black Death gene adaptations in Europe!

[srin]

So I think in general disease would be less likely to kill them because their bodies will just keep healing and not eventually get overwhelmed

Yeah, this makes sense to me! I imagine that if exposed to a new disease, or a new strain of the flu or similar, anything with sort of slow, creeping, low-level symptoms, they might have a short period of discomfort before the healing factor kind of wakes up and goes 'oh wait, this is a problem.' So they're not going to die of anything that would take a while to kill an ordinary person who started off healthy. But maybe they might die of something new that progresses really rapidly? For example the bubonic variety of the plague would be a non-fatal inconvenience but the septicaemic variety might get them.

Cholera ties into another theory I have, which is that the healing will fix wounds and do whatever it needs to do to make them not-dead if they die from something other than an injury, but doesn't really fix things that aren't the result of physical damage as such. So if they die of starvation for example, they will come back, but they won't be magically feeling well-fed when they wake up, and they'll starve again before long if they don't get something to eat. So things like malnutrition and dehydration can still affect them.

[goodbyebird]

I didn't even know about the Black Death gene adaptations. Humans are so neat!

So I think in general disease would be less likely to kill them because their bodies will just keep healing and not eventually get overwhelmed

Yup, that sounds about right.

Wish I knew more about how antibodies and such work, could probably wring some interesting story ideas out of it. My internet has kept me from seeking much of anything out, but once I get home I'll be fandomming hard *g*

[redrikki]

So, Spanish Flu killed by creating extreme immune responses in the victims. Their temperatures would rise fast and high. Their lungs would fill with fluids and they'd drown in their own fluids. The mortality curve was unusual because it was mostly healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 40 who died that way. So, what I'm saying is, at least one of them totally died of Spanish Flu.

[goodbyebird]

Duly noted, thank you!