Too many sci-fi movies make it seem like you’ve got minutes before catastrophic symptoms appear after being exposed, but what’s the most realistic timeframe for an infection to cause a severe response?
Honestly, pretty fast. You could look at cases of bowel rupture, where a large amount of bacteria quickly gains access to the bloodstream, causing sepsis and rapid death without immediate intervention. Can go from infection to death in half a day.
If we’re just asking for a severe response instead of death, it just depends on how severe it needs to be. The bacteria is throughout your body within minutes, flowing at the speed your blood circulates, and almost immediately triggering a massive immune response. This immune response leads to shock, which is what kills you.
Great response!
So, something like botulism (according to Health Canada) can take 12 - 72 after ingestion for symptoms to appear. But even that seems pretty damn slow. Anthrax is even slower.
Are there any which cause symptoms in minutes?
Again, my context is that movies make it seem like if you’re scratched by something infectious, you’ve got minutes before you’re a zombie. LOL
Theoretical zombifying pathogens have a few additional hurdles to pass. One, they can’t destroy your tissue, because it’s still necessary to operate the body. Two, they need access to your brain, which your body has a natural barrier protecting. Pathogens have a hard time getting in unless they start very nearby. Third, it’d have to alter your brain in such a way that a lot of behavior was left intact without destroying basic motor function and some simple logic.
This just isn’t easy to do. Probably would require some kind of super spiffy sci fi nanotechnology to actually pull off. Like, if Tony injected his fanciest suit’s nanites into your body and controlled them remotely, he might be able to ask Jarvis (or whoever it was, I forget) to zombify you.
Theoretically.
Theoretical zombifying pathogens have a few additional hurdles to pass.
We can only hope that the “zombie-ant fungus” never figures out a way to bypass human defence mechanisms. LOL
Thanks for the explanation. I really appreciate the insight.
We have something kinda like that, it’s called rabies.
FWIW such short timespan seems possible with venom.
Maybe two vector approach would make such thing possible - you get infected some other time and the virus is dormant until the venom gets you.
I’m not a biologist, though :)
FWIW such short timespan seems possible with venom.
Yes, venom came to mind, but I thought that might be cheating :)
It’s pretty scary to see just how many things have the potential to give us a really bad day from just a small prick or touch or taste!
You have to separate infections from poisonings. You can drink cyanide right now and be dead in 30 seconds. Or eat Amanita mushroom and be dead in 3 hours. But that’s because the mushroom already contains the neurotoxin! An infection, by definition, involves replication of the foreign organism within your body, and that takes time. E.coli bacteria are some of the fastest replicators, and they still take 45 minutes per division at minimum. There is only so fast they can physically duplicate DNA and assimilate foreign molecules. And you need multiple successive divisions to build up a population to count as an infection - on the order of days. Viral infections can grow even faster than bacterial, but they still take time. COVID is one of the most infectious viruses known, and it still takes 3-5 days from exposure to symptom onset. The fastest colds take ~24 hours. Not minutes! Even if you have the most advanced militarized bioweapon zombie virus, you cannot bypass the laws of physics - DNA is still replicated at 100 nucleotides per second. Whatever is causing someone in the movies to turn into a zombie in minutes is not an infection, it is a brain-killing neurotoxin at best.
Great answer! I enjoy watching “ChubbyEmu” videos on YouTube (he’s an MD) and he covers a ton of food poisoning, ingestion of huge quantities of “normal” food that causes crazy health outcomes, infections, and other cool stuff. It’s crazy how violently the body reacts, but that’s obviously for good reason - it just needs to calm the hell down sometimes, since the body’s reaction is often what hurts us!
