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Actually, the character doesn't recover from the ability score damage.
Effect: This is the effect that the character suffers each time if he fails his saving throw against the affliction. Most afflictions cause ability damage or hit point damage. These effects are cumulative, but they can be cured normally. Other afflictions cause the creature to take penalties or other effects. These effects are sometimes cumulative, with the rest only affecting the creature if it failed its most recent save. Some afflictions have different effects after the first save is failed. These afflictions have an initial effect, which occurs when the first save is failed, and a secondary effect, when additional saves are failed, as noted in the text. Hit point and ability score damage caused by an affliction cannot be healed naturally while the affliction persists.
So the player needs to roll out the saving throws each day, pay for Remove Disease or find another alternative method to cure himself of the disease.
In D&D the scores still recovered, even when they were being damaged. It was explicitly a change in Pathfinder. It changes getting hit with filth fever from a bit of a speed bump into a seriously life threatening condition. Several times I've seen parties laid up for a week or two with CONs getting down to around 2. Anti-plague is your friend!
Wow, never noticed that. That poor elf rogue who died of ghoul fever the other night after Echoes of the Overwatched should have actually gone down even quicker than he did. (Well, except that I completely screwed that up in not pointing out to him or his compatriots that since they were in Absalom they could have bought a cure disease.) (Well, except that I still don't feel that bad about it since once I put an eyeball on his character sheet it was clear the character needed to at least be rebuilt anyway—2nd level elf with a 20 Dex, 18 Str, 18 int, and everything else in the teens EXCEPT his 10 Con.) (I really need to do a sitdown with him and his crew of four friends that have been showing up the last couple of weeks—one of them was playing a hobgoblin!)
I do a little song-and-dance routine at the beginning of every scenario I run about the Core Assumption, about owning legal copies of the additional resources you use to make your characters, and about the wild and wonderful world of organized play in general. This group of five friends (two couples and, well, a hobgoblin, apparently) have started showing up the last few weeks at our Tuesday night games and I love having them there (I'm working hard to grow the community, but beyond simple numbers they bring some much needed diversity, gender and otherwise) but they're obviously new to tabletop RPGs. This was the first time I'd ran for them, and they were surprised at the stuff I had questions about since their other GMs hadn't brought it up. That's on us, not them. If I'm their third GM on their fourth night of playing and the first one that's said anything, then obviously the "problem" isn't exclusively on their end, I mean. It still surprises me how many of the folks who play every week are mystified when I wave around a printout of the Additional Resources document.