Headscratchers / Star Trek: Deep Space Nine S01E05 "Babel"

• People with the virus still seem cogent in all respects except the ability to understand language. Why does no one attempt to communicate with gestures or pictures?
  • Jake does exactly that when he brings a nurse to O'Brien's bed in the ward. Given how O'Brien's attempts at writing failed, it is possible that trying to draw pictures would have the same fate.
• When O’Brien and others start having problems being understood, why doesn’t anybody consider that the universal translator might be acting up? Everything else on the station is in disrepair (except the artificial gravity) so that seems a plausible candidate.
  • If it had only been Kira who was having trouble understanding O'Brien when he first started showing symptoms of aphasia, they might have thought it was a problem with the universal translator, but the fact that the other human officers who were in ops at the time also couldn't understand him indicated that something was wrong with O'Brien himself.