Ways of talking about diseases, ailments, convalescence, and well-being vary from language to language. In some, an ailment ‘hits’ or ‘gets’ the person; in others, the sufferer ‘catches’ an ailment, comes to be a ‘container’ for it, or is presented as a ‘fighter’ or a ‘battleground’. In languages with obligatory expression of information source, the onslaught of disease is treated as ‘unseen’, just like any kind of internal feeling or shamanic activity. Do the grammatical means of talking about diseases and ailments reflect traditional attitudes and thoughts about the origins of adverse conditions? How are diseases inflicted and spread? And what are the patterns involved in describing traditional healing practices and ‘getting better’? Our special focus is on languages from hot-spots of linguistic diversity and diseases of all sorts — especially Amazonia, with special attention to Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the multilingual Vaupes River Basin area, and the problems of translating COVID19 information brochures into this and other languages.