I've been hearing a lot of theories about how the sickness Rousseau was talking about might be the time travel side effects experienced by Desmond in the Constant, but I don't know if I buy that. While it is possible, as some have pointed out already, what happened to Desmond was caused in part by his leaving the island on an incorrect bearing (slightly deviated from the one Faraday gave Frank). Nothing in Rousseau's story indicates that her people went off the island and started experiencing the sickness, and it seems to have been implied that what happened to them happened on the island anyway. Okay, so here's my theory, gained after re-watching season one of all things
All we really know about the sickness is that it makes people go crazy, right? Well, what other element of Lost mythology makes people go crazy? If Leonard, Sam Toomey, and almost Hurley have anything to say about it, I think the sickness is the end result of encountering the Numbers, the last stage of Hurley's curse. When Hurley asks Rousseau what the numbers mean, she says that her people tried to figure out what they meant, and then the sickness came. Whether she knew it or not, I think those two things are related. Leonard and Sam Toomey both went insane because of the numbers, and it could be argued that Kelvin did too, possibly because he lost faith in the vaccine and stopped taking it. Hurley came close to losing it, but got away from the numbers when he crash landed on the island (or so he thought). He assumed that getting away from the money would solve his problems, but once he found the numbers on and in the hatch, he started to lose it again, almost blowing up th! e hatch, and hallucinating Dave.
I think the numbers are a mathematical representation of entropy, that force that leads all things to decay and die, and as the core values of the Valenzetti equation, they predict the gradual death of mankind. The closer we get to the end, the more the numbers appear in life, and the more one associates with the numbers, trying to figure them out or using them for personal gain, the more one attracts this entropy. Your life begins to unravel as though you are cursed, and eventually your mind unravels as well. This explains why Dharma would invent a vaccine for it for use in the Swan hatch, because they would be dealing with then numbers on a regular basis.
Theory by Ben
All we really know about the sickness is that it makes people go crazy, right? Well, what other element of Lost mythology makes people go crazy? If Leonard, Sam Toomey, and almost Hurley have anything to say about it, I think the sickness is the end result of encountering the Numbers, the last stage of Hurley's curse. When Hurley asks Rousseau what the numbers mean, she says that her people tried to figure out what they meant, and then the sickness came. Whether she knew it or not, I think those two things are related. Leonard and Sam Toomey both went insane because of the numbers, and it could be argued that Kelvin did too, possibly because he lost faith in the vaccine and stopped taking it. Hurley came close to losing it, but got away from the numbers when he crash landed on the island (or so he thought). He assumed that getting away from the money would solve his problems, but once he found the numbers on and in the hatch, he started to lose it again, almost blowing up th! e hatch, and hallucinating Dave.
I think the numbers are a mathematical representation of entropy, that force that leads all things to decay and die, and as the core values of the Valenzetti equation, they predict the gradual death of mankind. The closer we get to the end, the more the numbers appear in life, and the more one associates with the numbers, trying to figure them out or using them for personal gain, the more one attracts this entropy. Your life begins to unravel as though you are cursed, and eventually your mind unravels as well. This explains why Dharma would invent a vaccine for it for use in the Swan hatch, because they would be dealing with then numbers on a regular basis.
Theory by Ben