DayZ Disease Treatment Guide: Every Illness, Its Cure, and the Ones With No Cure

All three make you vomit when you eat or drink too much at once, and vomiting deletes the water and energy you are trying to recover. So the shared first step is the same whatever the cause: stop the suspect exposure, then take small sips and small bites instead of one large meal. The cure then splits by cause. Cholera follows dirty water: ponds, rivers, streams, an unpurified bottle, or drinking with bloody hands. Its cure is tetracycline, and multivitamins help your immunity fight it. Salmonellosis follows raw or rotten ordinary meat, fat or guts, or eating and drinking with bloody hands after butchering. Its direct cure is charcoal tablets, and multivitamins help. Food poisoning follows burnt or rotten food, gasoline swallowed by accident, or an unknown food can: charcoal tablets fix it, or it passes on its own if you survive the vomiting. The classic error is reaching for tetracycline against salmonellosis or food poisoning. It is an important medicine, but it is not their cure, and repeated doses leave the real cause in place.

Community guides sometimes blur these two, so keep them apart by what you swallowed. Food poisoning comes from bad food and unknown cans. Chemical poisoning comes from drinking disinfectant, gasoline or alcohol tincture itself. The symptoms overlap in vomiting, but chemical poisoning adds blood loss that keeps draining until treated, and that is what kills. Charcoal tablets are the treatment, and blood loss still needs managing: food, water and rest to rebuild, and blood support if you have it. Do not try to wait chemical poisoning out the way you can wait food poisoning out.

An untreated common cold becomes influenza, and untreated influenza becomes pneumonia, which adds stamina loss on top of health damage. The first two clear with tetracycline or multivitamins, or with strong immunity from staying fed, warm and healthy. Pneumonia needs tetracycline and nothing else works, so never let a cough sit through a session. Codeine is not a cure at any stage: it only suppresses coughing and sneezing frequency, which can hide how bad the chain has become. A medical thermometer confirms fever, but fever is shared by cholera, influenza and stage 2 wound infection, so a reading is never a diagnosis on its own.

Stage 1 shows as pain sounds and light blur, and disinfectant spray, iodine tincture or alcohol tincture handles it, as does bandaging with a dressing that is already disinfected. Stage 2 adds fever and steady health damage, and disinfectant alone is no longer enough: it needs tetracycline. The whole branch is preventable at almost no cost, because it starts with a dirty dressing or a bleeding wound left to close on its own. Disinfect your rags before you bandage with them and you skip the entire problem. Note that wound infection is the one branch high immunity does not solve on its own: being healthy helps everything else, but it does not disinfect a wound.

Gas poisoning comes from contaminated zones, and its signature is coughing up blood. The treatment is PO-X Antidote, and blood loss from the exposure is supported with an untainted IV blood bag. Tetracycline and charcoal do not cure it. The real preparation happens before you enter: a gas mask and NBC gear, and a route out, because no pill in your pocket replaces the antidote you did not bring.

Heatstroke is not an infection, which is why antibiotics do nothing for it. In the published 1.30 scripts it is a hidden heat build-up that rises while your character is overheating and falls once you cool down. Your temperature indicator is the warning light, and how much you have drunk decides what happens next: while the indicator is only warm and yellow, a well-watered character does not build heat at all, and a half-watered one tops out at the first stage. Short of water, or once the indicator goes red, it climbs regardless. Stage 1 is only sweating water away, and that is your cue to act. Stage 2 brings blurred vision, worse stamina and overheating animations or sounds. Stage 3 brings vomiting, which costs water and food you cannot spare and drains stamina afterwards. Stage 4 brings fading vision, health loss and short blackouts.

There is no pill for heatstroke. You bring it down by cooling off and drinking. Get into shade, a building, or lighter, looser clothing, and once your temperature indicator drops out of the hot range the build-up drains away on its own, but slowly: from the fainting stage it takes a long time, so do not rely on waiting alone. Use Wash face at a well or any body of water, or with a bottle of water in your hands: one wash knocks the build-up down by about as much as half an hour of waiting in the shade, and it freezes the build-up for about 30 seconds so it cannot rise, but more washing inside that window does not lower it further. Wash once, give it 30 seconds, then wash again. Wetting clothing at a well or the water edge lowers the build-up as well, outside that 30-second window. If you are already at the fainting stage, get under cover first and drink second: passing out in the open sun is how this goes from annoying to fatal. Do not bother hunting for a thermometer: it only reports fever, and heatstroke does not register as one.

Silicosis is the sandstorm illness. While a storm is on top of you, the game feeds silicosis into your lungs and grit into your eyes at a rate that depends on how strong the storm is where your head is. Shelter is what stops it, and the scripts are strict about what counts: inside a building means under a roof and inside the interior at the same time, so a porch, a carport or a wall-less ruin may not be enough. Underground bunkers and tunnels shut the storm out, and sitting inside a car fades it out too. A motorbike does not count, no matter how fast you ride. Out in the open, a mask or face wrap with dust protection cuts how much you breathe in, and glasses or goggles protect your eyes, but treat the best face covering you own as a way to buy time, not a reason to stay out. A Nasdara sandstorm lasts roughly half an hour in the scripts, about 26 to 38 minutes, which is far too long to spend coughing in the open.

For silicosis itself there is no medicine, and antibiotics do not touch it. What clears it is your own body: once you are out of the dust, it fades by itself, but only while your immune system is in reasonable shape. DayZ works out immunity from health, blood, food and water, so a well-fed, hydrated character recovers and a starving, half-dead one stays stuck, and it does not fade while you are unconscious. So the practical cure is shelter, food, water, rest, and waiting, and multivitamins help because they push immunity to the top tier for five minutes, which is enough to get recovery going if you are in a bad way. Irritated eyes are a separate condition from silicosis: your character squints in the storm, and grit builds an eye-irritation effect over the screen. The fix is Wash face again. At a well or a pond each wash halves the irritation, so two or three clear it. A bottle works too, but each wash clears only a sliver, so it takes many times longer. The irritation also wears off on its own once you are out of the sand, under the same decent-health rule as silicosis.

Kuru, also called brain prion disease, comes from eating human steak, fat or guts, cooked or raw. The signs are hard to miss: tremors and random outbursts of laughter as control of emotion and movement breaks down. There is no treatment and no reversal, and the only prevention is never eating human flesh or meat from unknown sources. A hemolytic reaction is not something you pick up from the world: it happens when someone receives incompatible blood. Once it starts there is no medicine that fixes it on the spot, and it ends in death, so the entire treatment is prevention: get the blood type right before the transfusion.