You've been working a stressful job for years. Perhaps you've been traveling for a while, and you feel like slowing down for a bit. Maybe you come from someplace that's always cold, or you just finished a strenuous bicycle or climbing trip. If so, watch out, because you may be susceptible to a dangerous, highly contagious virus, the greatly feared and poorly studied Island Laziness Disease (ILD).

Students, lawyers, doctors, professors, and long-term travelers are especially vulnerable. But it can strike anyone, given the right circumstances.

It starts innocently enough. You decide to visit a tropical island somewhere, to take a little vacation. Before you know it, you've lost all sense of time, and everything slips away. If you ever recover, you will wonder what happened to the intervening years, just like Rip Van Winkle.

The virus attacks the Western mindset, the drive to do something productive. Telltale symptoms include a gradual darkening of the skin, glazed eyes, putting off obligations indefinitely, and forgetting what month it is. If it is not caught early, the infected person may never adjust to Western society again, and could be doomed to live out the rest of her life surrounded by the sea, stuck in a slower pace.

I contracted a mild case of ILD on a January visit to Thailand. It could have been much worse, but through sheer luck I received a few vaccinations at crucial stages of the disease's progress. Perhaps my story can help prevent others from becoming infected.

I had just finished a month-long bicycle tour in New Zealand, and before that I was working in a remote, chilly corner of Alaska for the summer. I had two strikes against me: I was ready for a break from moving non-stop for months, and it had been years since I had been anywhere hot. Fortunately, my resistance was strong, and I survived with few side effects.