We regretfully demand a visual novel based on these sexy diseases

Taiwan CDC diseases — (Image credit: Taiwan CDC)

Education is one of the most important methods to combat the spread of disease, but Taiwan's Center for Disease Control doesn't just want to teach you about common illnesses. It wants you to be sexually attracted to them. Back in 2018, it began working with some illustrators to transform some well-known diseases like Lyme disease, hepatitis—and, yes, even covid-19—into stylish anime waifus. Despite being in the works for a few years, I only heard about the project this morning. And now that I've exposed the rest of PC Gamer's editorial team to the absurdity of sexy anime diseases, we have a single demand: Put them in a game, goddammit.

To date, the Taiwan CDC has released 25 of these characters and each one is pretty damn amazing. You can find them all on Resetera, along with some helpful translations of the accompanying personality profiles of each disease. Acute Hepatitis, for example, is a boy band wearing pins of lips and poo emojis since that's one of the most common ways to contract hepatitis. Meanwhile, Syphilis' outfit pays homage to the poem for which the disease got its name, in which a shepherd named Syphilis was afflicted with the disease by the god Apollo. According to her official biography, she also likes classical music, falling in love, and will "find chance to stab you" if you ever leave her. Neat. My personal favorite, though, is Viral Gastroenteritis (stomach flu). There is no way a bug that causes vomiting and diarrhea is allowed to be that good looking.

At the risk of shredding up the last bit of dignity I have, I want to date some of these diseases. I want them all to be pals in a visual novel where we meet and talk and flirt and fall in love or become besties. I want to play Hades but instead of Grecian gods it's just a bunch of hot diseases.

This impulse is making me seriously question whether the Taiwan CDC were thinking clearly when they decided, hey, let's make very serious illnesses fuckable. But what's done is done: All the ingredients are there, someone just needs to take the time to put them together into a game.

There's a gallery below if you want to see all 25 diseases, and you can head to this Resetera thread to get a translated profile on most of them. Just remember to clear your browser history after so you don't have to explain this to anyone.

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With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.