the laughing death
torture at the hands of joy
An infection of unknown origin that slowly destroys the emotions and eventually the mind of the victim.
The disease affects almost entirely mine workers in the central Dry Mountains, particularly in Naya Xinsho and occasionally Edio.
Causes
The Zhoyaala of Vitality has not been able to find any natural cause for the laughing death. This lack of real evidence has helped propogate the notion that disease is caused by the victim being cursed by "demons from the west". There is no evidence for this theory either, and there has never been any indication why any force or creature might want to cause such a strange and life destroying effect, yet a magical influence on the mind and body is as reasonable an explaination for the disease as any other.
Symptoms
The early symptoms are minor loss of memory and an unusual absence of fear. Eventually the fearlessness is followed by a total lack of anger. This in turn by an inability to feel sad. Disgust is the next feeling to disappear, followed by surprise. Eventually the sufferer is left only able to feel happiness, and then this happiness becomes overpowering and overwhelming. This process takes many years, often decades.
The lack of fear often kills sufferers early in the symptoms as the victim lacks natural feelings of caution or hesitation that might lead them into dangerous situations. For those that do survive through the loss of fear, anger, sadness and even disgust, the result is usually insanity. Life experiences become so skewed and alienating that the mind can no longer cope.
For those few that make it through the final stages, they spend most their waking time simply laughing uproariously at any and all stimuli. They sleep only when their body has reached extreme exhaustion, and they can only be kept alive by force feeding. Eventually the over simulation and physical tole of constant laughter causes either heart failure or aneurism, leading to the common name of the disease: the laughing death.
Treatment
There is no known or concievable treatment.
Prognosis
The prognosis is always fatal. The manner of death may vary greatly, but is most often some sort of accidental injury caused by a total lack of caution or hesitation in a dangerous situation. Those who die of the actual organ failure caused by perpetual laughter at the end of the disease represent less than 1 in 10 of those that aquire the disease.
Affected Groups
The laughin death is aquired almost exclusively by miners working in the Dry Mountains.
Epidemiology
A miner will wander off on a break or be sent on a prospecting mission, and return to their team or camp in a dazed state. They often show minor injuries as if they had fallen down a tripped amongst the rocks, and always have some form of short term memory loss. Some seem only confused about where they had been and what had happened to them, while others might lose some details of who they were and where they were, their memories only returning after many days.
The initial symptoms can take up to a year to show, and though now are known and looked out for, were once ignored or disregarded for years untill the victems overall behavior began changing more noticably.
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