Not disagreeing entirely, but better examples would have been gay and trans, where the gay and trans people haven't changed very much but the medical and cultur

Not disagreeing entirely, but better examples would have been gay and trans, where the gay and trans people haven't changed very much but the medical and cultural response toward them has changed quite a bit over the last couple decades. Also (original) OP seems to assume starvation mode is as healthy as normal mode, which is ... questionable at best. Yes if a tapeworm is sucking glucose out of your blood, as long as it doesn't suck too much and kill you, you'll either have to go into starvation fat burning mode essentially permanently as long as you're infected which might have some negative long term side effects, or you can try to live normally which will result in obesity. Aside from the medical problems from living in permanent starvation mode, I imagine the psychological experience is incredibly unpleasant. From memory starvation is contraindicated for recovery from surgery, pregnancy, and athletic training. I wonder how many infected people die after a relatively boring surgery because either they're fat or they're starving so they can't recover correctly. Or miscarriages where the body thinks its in deep starvation mode so better the mother survive than take them both down, despite normal food intake. Aside from the obvious pregnancy complications from obesity, of course. Any way you look at it, that virus needs eradicating.