DayZ Disease Guide: Symptoms, Causes, Cures, and Medical Items

DayZ gives survivors plenty of obvious ways to die: infected, bullets, wolves, bad falls, and starvation. Disease is less dramatic, but it can be just as lethal. If your character starts coughing, vomiting, shaking, or losing health for no clear reason, the problem is probably not vibes. It is illness.

How Diseases Work in DayZ

Diseases, infections, and viruses in DayZ usually come from unsafe behavior: drinking bad water, eating raw or spoiled food, staying cold too long, entering toxic zones, or using dirty medical supplies.

The best defense is awareness. Track what your character recently ate, drank, touched, or survived. If symptoms appear early, treating the disease quickly usually costs fewer resources than waiting until it gets worse.

Most illnesses are also infectious. A sick survivor can contaminate opened food or other consumables, then pass the illness to another player. After recovering, it is smart to remove suspect consumables from your inventory or disinfect items that can be cleaned, such as bandages and bandanas.

Many diseases progress through stages. Cholera, for example, becomes more expensive to treat if it is allowed to develop. Treat symptoms early, stay fed and hydrated, and avoid sharing questionable snacks unless diplomacy has failed completely.

DayZ Diseases, Symptoms, and Treatments

Cholera

• Symptoms: Fever, sweating, and severe vomiting
• Cause: Drinking unsafe water or receiving blood from a sick survivor
• Treatment: Tetracycline Pills or Multivitamin Pills

Cold

• Symptoms: Sneezing and severe sneezing
• Cause: Exposure to cold conditions
• Treatment: Tetracycline Pills or Multivitamin Pills

Frostbite

• Symptoms: Blue skin and permanent maximum health reduction
• Cause: Long exposure to cold
• Treatment: Keep warm

Hemolytic Reaction

• Symptoms: Immediate unconsciousness
• Cause: Receiving the wrong blood type during a transfusion
• Treatment: No cure, but the condition can last up to three minutes

Influenza

• Symptoms: Sneezing, coughing, fever, blurred vision, and increased water loss
• Cause: Untreated Cold
• Treatment: Tetracycline Pills or Multivitamin Pills

Kuru

• Symptoms: Random uncontrollable laughter and tremors
• Cause: Eating any human meat
• Treatment: Death or suicide

Pneumonia

• Symptoms: Shortness of breath, heavily reduced stamina, and health loss over time
• Cause: Untreated Influenza
• Treatment: Multivitamin Pills while staying warm early in the disease. It almost always kills after 24 minutes.

Poisoning

• Symptoms: Constant vomiting
• Cause: Eating bad food
• Treatment: No full cure, but 1 Tetracycline Pill reduces the duration

Salmonella

• Symptoms: Vomiting and severe fever
• Cause: Eating raw meat
• Treatment: Charcoal Tablets or a Multivitamin Pill

Toxic Poisoning

• Symptoms: Coughing blood, health loss, unconsciousness, and death
• Cause: Entering toxic zones
• Treatment: A compatible blood transfusion from a healthy survivor or a PO-X Antidote

Wound Infection

• Symptoms: Light pain sounds, reduced stamina, and heavy blurry vision
• Cause: Using unclean bandages
• Treatment: Tetracycline Pills

Medical Items and Uses

• Disinfectants: Alcoholic Tincture, Iodine, and Disinfectant Spray
• Healing supplies: Bandages, Rags, Bandanas, and Sewing Kits
• Water purification: Chlorine Tablets, Chelating Tablets, and Filtering Bottle
• Blood tools: Blood Bag Kit combined with an IV Start Kit for transfusions, Blood Test Kit for checking blood type, and Saline Bag combined with an IV Start Kit to increase blood regeneration
• Temperature tools: Heat Pack for warming the body and Medical Thermometer for diagnosing temperature and possible illness
• Medicine: Charcoal Tablets for poisoning and Salmonella, Tetracycline Pills for bacterial infections, Multivitamin Pills for some cures and disease resistance, Codeine Pills for flu-related diseases and movement while injured, Morphine for brief injury movement support and flu symptom suppression, Epinephrine Auto-Injector for reviving unconscious players, and PO-X Antidote for toxic poisoning