Guide to Virology

Despite measures to sterilise its space stations, pathogens still make their way onto NanoTrasen Space Vessels. Below is a guide on how to deal with them.

Virology 101

The first, and most important way to prevent 99% of infections, it's proper hazard wear, and knowing how to keep the infection from spreading.

The Clothes

The following will protect you, from the dangerous infections of space, each giving more and more (till total) protection against infection:

• Level-3 Bio Hood
• Level-3 Bio Suit
• Medical or White Jumpsuit
• Sterile Mask
• Latex Gloves
• Shoes (White shoes and Galoshes are the best)
• Private (clean) Air Flow System

For those not in the medical profession, the following commonly avaliable items will help reduce your chances of infection:

• Any internals hooked up to a tank
• Gloves
• Clothes

Isolation

If you, or another crew member are infected, do not spread the infection further. Seek the isolation bay of the medical wing, or head to a room no one will enter but yourself and other infected.

Cleanliness

Cleaning blood spills from the ground will prevent contact contamination, make sure blood is cleaned from the floor at all time. Any blood splatter out there could hold a dreaded space infection. Contact a janitor if you see blood on the floor, do not interact with the blood if you suspect possible infection chance.

Mucus caused by infected people sneezing also carries the same problem.

Methods of Infection

The following are the various ways a disease can spread, keep this in mind at all times:

• Airborne - The most dangerous and quick spreading, if you are anywhere within the breathing area of the infected crew member, you have a chance to be infected.
• Direct Contact - Requires you to touch, been touched, or be extremely close to the source of the infection. The infection could be from a blood spill (all blood spills containing contact, or airborne, infections can infect through blood contact).
• Direct Infection - The infection has been forced into the infected crew member, they are not infectious themselves. The only way to spread these infections, is through getting the patient's blood directly into another crew member.

Viruses

Primarily, this is your job. Find a batch of a virus, analyze it, and then produce a cure. You also research and splice new forms of virus.

Equipment

You have a number of machines around virology which help in the both analysing, curing, and research viruses.

• Isolation Centrifuge - This machine takes vials filled with blood and isolates pathogens or antibodies. It will automatically detect whether a sample of blood contains either, and can be useful for telling which people are infected. It can then isolate the pathogen, producing a virus dish, or isolate the antibody, producing a vial of antibodies.
• Pathogenic incubator - This machine takes virus dishes made by the centrifuge, or from the samples in your lab and grows them. It requires diluted milk (virus food) to work however, so ask the Chemist or Chef or use the virus food dispenser in Virology. The machine will ping when the virus reaches a large enough size to be worked with. Radiating the machine may cause the virus to mutate and change one or more of it's symptoms. You can also add a beaker of blood to the machine and infect it with whatever virus dish is currently in the machine.
• Disease Analyser - Putting a sufficiently grown virus dish in here will analyse the virus and display the symptoms on a piece of paper and on examining the virus dish. Also allows the Disease Splicer to show what the symptoms you're splicing are. This will also add a virus to the virus database, allowing it to be named and detected by a medical scanner.
• Disease Splicer - Each virus has four GNA strand which control which symptoms it causes. This splicer can isolate one of those strains and store it. This destroys the dish in the process however. You can then save the strand to a disk and transfer it to a different virus dish. This is how you can make your own viruses.

Curing

If you're concerned about the monkeys and don't want to have a pen full of contagion conveniently sitting around, move a single monkey to one of your isolation rooms and treat/infect them there. You can also use this as an easy way to keep all your cures localized and in a single sample.

• Take a Virus Dish and add it to the Pathogenic incubator.
• Add a beaker of blood.
• 'Inject' the blood with the virus using the Pathogenic incubator.
• Inject some into a monkey to infect it.
• Inject the monkey with radium to start antibody production. This may take multiple injections and multiple attempts. A large and rapid amount of toxin damage is usually an indicator of antibodies. Using the antibody scanner also works.
• Wait for a minute or two. This part is the most important, if you take blood too early, there will be no antibodies.
• Take some blood from the monkey and add it to the Isolation Centrifuge. It should display some antibodies.
• A vial of antibodies will be produced. This can be injected into other people to cure the disease. Note that isolating antibodies takes a long time and requires a body to produce antibodies to produce a very limited amount. Stocking up on antibodies in an outbreak is advisable. Even miniscule amount of pure antibodies is enough to start breeding in patient, so they can be dilluted with any liquid to produce large amounts of vaccine

If there happens to be an outbreak on the station you'll need a few extra steps.

• Find someone with the virus (shouldn't be too difficult as people like to complain.)
• Extract some blood and then put it in the Isolation Centrifuge.
• Isolate the pathogen.
• This will produce a Virus Dish.
• Follow the above steps.

Optional steps are:

• Put the Virus Dish in the Pathogenic incubator and grow it until the machine pings.
• Put the Virus Dish into the Disease Analyser to tell what the disease does.

If it works, congratulations. You've found a cure. Make sure to inject all infected and anyone else to vaccinate them. It only take a few units per person to cure/vaccinate them, so try to be as efficient as possible. You can dilute the antibodies with water and as long as one unit of antibodies in injected the cure will still work.

Splicing

To understand splicing, you must know that every virus has 4 GNA strands. Each strand has a respective symptom related to it, in varying degrees of severity, 4 being the lowest, and first symptom to manifest, and 1 being the highest, and final symptom to manifest. The disease splicer allows you to replace GNA strands with other GNA strands of the same level.

The disease splicer has three functions, which allow you to modify viruses, allowing you to define which GNA strands they have. The first of these functions is utilising the splicing function, to copy a GNA strand from an inserted virus tray to the disease splicer buffer. This is done by selecting the desired GNA strand. Doing so will destroy the virus tray in the process, so be aware of this fact.

The disease splicer’s second function is to copy whatever strand it has stored in its buffer, to a disk. These disks can be inserted into the disease splicer, uploading their respective strand to its buffer immediately, and unlike in the case of virus trays, disks will remain intact upon uploading their strand.

The final function of the disease splicer is to apply the strand stored within its buffer, to a virus, replacing the current strand on the respective level of the buffer’s strand’s level. This is done by selecting the strand located in the buffer.

With these functions in mind, the process in order for you to develop your own virus follows these steps:

• Firstly, you must obtain a disk for each strand level that you wish to apply to a virus. This is where the incubator’s irradiating functions prove useful, as you can potentially generate every GNA strand you want, by mutating a base virus.
• Secondly you must obtain a virus upon which you will apply your desired GNA strands. It does not matter what the original strands are, as you will be overwriting them with your desired strands.
• Finally you must insert this dish into the splicer, and splice each strand from your disks, by uploading them to the buffer one at a time, and splicing them over the disease.

Once you have your final product, you can use the Cure Research Machine to create a beaker of blood containing the virus.

Symptom Listings

These are all the symptoms and their effect:

• Unidentified Foreign Body: Caused by an Alien Embryo. Requires Surgery to remove.
• Gibbingtons Syndrome: Gibs the infected person. Obviously fatal.
• Hallucinational Syndrome: Causes Hallucinations.
• Radian's syndrome: Build up of Radiation damage.
• Hyperacid Syndrome: Causes severe Toxin damage.
• Automated sleeping syndrome: Causes drowsiness and sleeping.
• World Shaking syndrome: Vision shakes.
• Hard of hearing syndrome: Causes deafness.
• Waiting Syndrome: Harmless, though prevents early detection.
• Telepathy Syndrome: Gives telepathy.
• Monkism syndrome: Turns infected into monkey.
• Coldingtons Effect: Causes sneezing and mucus spreading. Also makes disease airborne.
• Anima Syndrome: Causes coughing and mucus spreading. Also makes disease airborne.
• Flemmingtons: Causes the 'Mucous runs down the back of your throat.' message. No other effects.
• Toxification syndrome: Causes lesser Toxin damage.
• Resting syndrome: Causes collapsing.
• Lazy mind syndrome: Causes brain damage.
• Suicidal syndrome: Makes the infected person suicide.
• Appetiser Effect: Causes increased hunger.
• Groaning Syndrome: Causes groaning.
• Refridgerator Syndrome: Causes shivering.
• Twitcher: Causes twitching.
• Ghost Effect: Causes the infected to look pale.
• Poor Balance Syndrome: Causes stumbling.
• Hoarse Throat: Makes people rasp.