[Surly Professor]

Libra, you can survive rabies if you are given the vaccine before you're symptomatic. After symptoms appear it's a different story. There have only been a handful of symptomatic rabies survivors, but they were all due to vaccine mishaps.
Only Jeanna Giese has survived an infection without a vaccine.

Prodigious diarrhea is characteristic of Cholera, pikachugirl2.

Yeah Meaty, like I said in-thread: your poll's problem was that your featured diseases were all over the map as far as death rate, suffering, virulence, or really any variable went. These have more commonality, as they are all god awful.

Some of the things I left off because they weren't quite horrible enough: Leprosy, Syphilis, Kuru, & Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
I'll have to give some thought to an inborn disease poll. There are so many monsterous options.


P.S. I feel Smallpox isn't getting it's fare shake due to my lackluster description.
There's a reason why we've tried so hard to exterminate Smallpox globally.
It's estimated that Smallpox killed between 85 & 95% of the native population of the Americas during European colonization. And it's second to none where suffering's concerned.
(I have extended the description in white text below. Don't read it if you're squeamish.
I'm warning you, it really is quite horrible. This is the most horrible disease imo.)
You develop painful pus-filled blisters all over your skin; while you alternate between boiling with fever & freezing with chills.
In the most extreme form of the illness the pustules grow larger & larger until they merge and your flesh becomes a sack of grave wax. Like a big pustule it can rupture, and you can lose skin in large sheets. The pustules are also often on the inside of your mouth, rear end, and other internal areas. These areas can sluff off in sheets as well, sometimes leaving you with a tube of skin hanging out your pants that used to be the lining of your intestine.