(Frail) Milkman's Disease
Person: So you screw with bones, except your spinal cord, and make them insanely brittle to the point where just having a strong heartbeat due to fear can cause them pain?
Milkman's Disease: Yep.
Person: Okay how do you spread so I can avoid you? I'll be drinking lots of milk just to be sure that my skeleton can still be strong enough to hatch.
Milkman's Disease: I'm in your milk.
Person: *drops glass of milk*
Transmission & Vectors
Spreads rapidly among cows through the air in the facilities they're kept in but loses contagiousness when infecting humans.
Causes
Nobody's certain where it came from but that won't stop the CHG from claiming the LIR did it.
As for once you're infected: it only really kicks in as you're asleep. You get infected one day, continue as usual, wake up in pain and snap your legs trying to stand on your own 2 feet after dragging yourself out of bed.
Symptoms
VERY brittle bones. Over time, this becomes more of a problem with time as having pointy broken bones around, just for example, your ribs could lead to you dying because you rolled in bed and caused your rib to puncture your own heart.
Treatment
Replacement bone surgery. Not quite rich-exclusive but definitely enough to leave any working-class citizen who gets it in debt for several years.
Prognosis
If you don't get those bones replaced or stay still your entire life, you're dead. And either one of those could kill you anyway.
Sequela
The skull becomes brittle as well. On one occasion, a man tried lifting his head up for a few seconds before letting it fall back down on his pillow. The back of his skull fragmented and he spent the rest of his life incapable of feeling hunger, flinching and had to have a straw inserted into his bladder so he could urinate.
Hosts & Carriers
Cows carry the disease and humans drink it in milk.
Prevention
Not drinking milk made from cows or only drinking milk from cows whose companies have had health/safety checks within the last few weeks. There's also getting your own cow but this isn't an option for most people.
Epidemiology
Only contagious among cows. Which is great because then we know which ones to never take milk from again... yes, cooking them does remove the risk of the virus.
History
Reports of it started in the 2400s, the earliest in 2423 when an entire village ended up in robotic wheelchairs, and a disease was confirmed in 2427. Special Containment Procedures were used for the next 10 years when the virus became extremely widespread due to the movement of bulls infected with the disease, including the checking of every cow, as well as every bull that was moved between locations, and 20% of milk vats being checked. Since then it's been on the down low, just about low enough for the CHG not to care.
Cultural Reception
FEAR THE MILKMAN
Type
Viral
Parent
Cycle
Chronic, Acquired
Rarity
Rare
Affected Species
Your burning beautiful garbage always makes me laugh and I both love it for it's ingenuity and funniness and I hate it for how you refuse to take your own ideas, despite how incredible some of them are, seriously.
Thank you Thicc Shrek. How's the diet going?