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The lot of mankind, including the pain women bear in giving birth to infants with heads seemingly too large for their pelvic opening, has come under a lot of speculation. This has been ascribed to Eve's role in the Fall, as her punishment, for instance. Likewise, much speculation abounds about some of the diseases that mankind suffers. Lepers are quite often banned as unclean, with their lot blamed on the lepers as a curse brought on by their sins. Cancer victims are often treated in a like manner, as though they have a sin to hide, not just a disease to bear. If not the sufferer, then perhaps another has caused the infliction by casting a curse. Voodoo tales abound along these lines, with curse casters capable of inflicting death from afar.
Painful childbirth, like many peculiarities of man, is the result of genetic engineering. Leprosy is just a simple infectious disease, like the common cold, common to all who are unfortunate enough to encounter it while in a susceptible state. Cancer, of course, is a natural occurrence, and the cancer simply the failure of the body to rid itself promptly of a mutation. Voodoo victims cause their own deaths, their hearts stopped by intense fear, nicely cooperating with the curse. Why do humans persist in wanting to ascribe suffering to someone's will or deed? In part they are sensing the motives of those in the Service-to-Self, who reap recruits both in those rejected and in those rejecting when despair and hopelessness abound, and find themselves less influential when humans are comfortably with each other.
Where the Service-to-Self crowd has had little to do with mankind's unhappy lot, they have on occasion answered The Call and assisted with the spread of disease and despair. War and the debasement of others is commonly the route used, however, and disease is seldom considered. The reason for this is not only that disease affects all, and as with biological warfare, the threat of self infection is so great, but also that the ability of men to create biological weapons is recent. Where diseases have been around for centuries, they are not candidates for suspicion as biological weapons, but where a disease is newly emergent, this is certainly a possibility.