Myxamatosis

In their interminable effort to eradicate the rabbit infestation, the Australians at one point stooped to biowarfare. The rabbits had caused incalculable damage to the ecosystem, and at a population that may number in the billions, the Aussies were running out of bullets, and were markedly tired of rabbit stew.

Their attempt at a solution was to translocate a recent species jumping virus, the myxovirus of a Brazilian rabbit-like creature, to their own outback. Myxovirus had symbiotically adapted to its rainforest host, causing no symptoms, and no mortality. But in european rabbits, the adorable bunnies we know and love, the disease is one of the most infectious, invasive, and destructive diseases we have ever seen. In virology and infectious disease terms, the virus is hotter than hot.

At first glance, the effort was incredibly successful. A massive area of Australia was virtually depopulated of bunnies. But soon enough, nature ran its course, and the .1% of immune rabbits soon exploded again. But the effort had born some fruit. The research into myxovirus, a poxvirus variant, had shown quite a bit about the virus, which had intrigued researchers worldwide with its recent species jump.

We don't understand much of why viruses infect the species they infect. They pick and chose in live animals, infecting some and not others. When they jump species, it is almost always an extremely potent infection. But while studying the virus, a remarkable lab happenstance led to a researcher noting that myxovirus's selectivity was based less on animal type, and more on the presence or absence of a single immunoresponse pathway. A pathway coincidentally absent in virtually all human cancer.

One day, this accidental discovery could be on par with the discovery of penicillin. These viruses preferentially attack solely cancer cells. Mouse studies have shown 90% efficacy in eliminating gangliomas, some of the most resilient and cantankerous brain cancers we generate. This virus, this rabbit plague, kills cancer cells, and only cancer cells.

Myxamatosis. fantastic.

The Egg Lobby Wins Again

The unlikely culprit behind H1N1 shortages is out there, hiding in a chicken coop. Oddly enough, the reason behind the production bottleneck of vaccine has been a shortage in fresh fertilized eggs. This bizarre happenstance occurs due to the bizarre nature of the orthomyxidae (flu) virus that is the source of pandemic flu. Influenza A, the culprit behind the spanish flu epidemic of 1918, is the only human flu variant with the capability to cross-infect multiple species. This cross infection is the root culprit behind the potential of flu to break out of the normal seasonal infectious boundaries, and run rampant.

Viruses aren't like other organisms. In fact, its debatable if they are even alive. Once a virus infects your cells, it rips itself apart, reproducing its component pieces. Reassembly is random, just components bouncing into each other, making up for inefficiency with copious volume. These fractions include the RNA that makes up the flu's genetic blueprint. The problem is that if two viruses infect the same cell, say a pig cell, there is nothing stopping genetic fragments from pig-only flu from integrating into the genome of a human-infectious flu. This is where the danger arises. Humanity has seen just about every variant of flu that is human-infectious. Our bodies know how to fight these. They make us sick, but we beat them, and a good fraction of us are just immune to each variant. When a pig or bird virus integrates into one that can attack us, it become a type that we have never seen before. (a phenomenon known as antigenic shift)

This cross-species infectious pattern is why we are facing a shortage. The vaccine you receive, whether nasally or intramuscularly, was brewed up fresh by infecting the membrane of an unborn chicken. We do this in order to generate the same swapping effect that generates pandemic flu, but with the opposite effect. Growing the virus in the egg allows for less infective genomic fragments to integrate in, creating a flu virus with the same immune system ID as the pandemic variety, but with none of the infectious capabilities. This inactivated virus serves as our vaccine, driving an immune response without a risk of infection.

This process is arduous and difficult. Not only that, but the recombination is random, and ineffective. Imagine trying to produce the volume of vaccine necessary by farming eggs that may not even make the product you need. Now imagine doing this with a shortage of eggs.

Incredible Edible Infected Eggs. I suppose they ARE good for us.

Conduction

His face a mask of confusion, the older man sat down, easing his bulky upper torso carefully into the seat. He had walked in tentatively, shuffling in sandals, his feet and lower legs marked with accidental scuffs. Intimidated and alone, he looked around at us, apprehensive and not entirely sure what to do in this new situation.

The interview began slowly, the questions non-specific and general. He was in the hospital for memory loss, he self-reports, and we nod encouragingly. He told us he had trouble thinking. He would lose his thoughts. Each question came back with its own short answer, or merely a quiet request to hear it again, because he had forgotten.

We all looked at him, assessing his frame for signs of what had caused his problem. His barrel chest indicated potential emphysema. His swollen abdomen told us liver failure. It could be alcoholic damage, either direct or from hepatic emphysema. It could be alpha-1-anti-trypsin deficiency liver disease. We all sat there, thinking the mechanics through in our fact-sodden minds. Until someone asked him his children's age. For five long minutes he couldn't remember. For five long minutes we held our breath. He finally answered, his mind able to dig out the autobiographical information that should have resided right on the surface of his thoughts.

His dementia is conductive, the information of his life not gone, but inaccessible, blocked off behind a decaying network. He knows this, he can sense the absence of thought, the lack of interplay between his current situation and his wealth of acquired experience. He terrifies me, his condition a mirror to my worst fears. He lives in my nightmare, lost in his mind and completely aware of it. We have seen so many things, so much pain, and so much triumph. But this slow degeneration, this quicksand of conductive impotence, it cuts through the defenses. It makes me scared.

Airborne!

The ads used to be everpresent. The air traveler, locked in an aluminum trap with hosts of shockingly ill fellow travelers, a host of infectious disaster waiting to happen. The wary traveler wisely reaches into his or her bag, pulling out the the cure-all: airborne.

This generation's snake oil, the vitamin C megadose is widely held to bolster the immune system, helping your loyal host of T Cells to resist the onslaught of the barbarian hordes of bacterial and viral invaders. This, like the theory that anti-oxidants prevent cancer, is one of those unfortunate pop science ideas that has permeated society, the benefit of which is neglible to non-existent (unless you are the school-teacher who came up with "airborne").

Vitamin C megadoses don't improve your immune system. You may feel slightly better, since the chemical is a slight antihistamine, but if anything, the giant dose may prove slightly toxic. Vitamin C can cause urinary problems, not to mention the tendency to push your system to retain iron. In fact, habitual use of heavy Vitamin C dosages can drive you to develop hemochromatosis, a disease of iron overload that causes major liver damage (and makes eating raw oysters extremely dangerous).

So next time you fly, if you are so exceedingly terrified of the bugs, I strongly suggest a facemask.

Halvsies

The cadaver looked different today. The body shape was off, discontinuous, more lumpy than usual under the concealing shroud. The revelatory moment was a bit beyond surreal, a sheet pulled balk to reveal a dismembered body that had been, at some point in the day before, cut nearly precisely in half. A separated pair of legs stared longingly up at the trunk and upper body, intestines and spinal cords split asunder by a gap they had never known.

We hadn't performed the cut, a rare usurpation of our anatomists rights. We had left a body mostly intact, organs separated here and there, but with everything in its right place. We returned to find our work rudely ripped apart, the neat lines of our abdominal dissection shredded by the work of a gigantic saw. It was abrupt for us, a surprise.

Snake's final remaining touch of humanity had been taken, leaving only a disparate leg and torso combo, a value pack from the world's most disturbing store. It was done so we could study the legs and the pelvic girdle more completely, so we could understand the inside of our own hips. Someone had come into the lab, wielding the scientific equivalent of a chain-saw on fifty dead bodies. Someone does this every year.

It was far too hot...

He sits across from us, genial and jovial despite his general aura of defeat. He is in the inpatient psych ward for the fourth time this year, brought in to protect him from himself. Covered in a shiny spider web tracery of burn marks and skin graft repair, he relaxes on his chair, nonchalantly eating a bag of chips.

His hands are stubby and shortened, the final bone of both pinkies far too explicably missing. He talks about his life, his kids. He talks briefly about the war, but it is far too strong a memory for him. He is on a new mixture of drugs. He hopes out loud that this will be the batch that keeps him from the darker places of his mind.

He has grandkids. A new wife. Friends. How terrible is it that this neurochemical abnormality constantly tries to take that from him. He locked himself in a car once. Covered in gasoline, he lit a match. The heat snapped him out of it, he reports. Deciding that it was far too hot in there, he got out. He won that fight, as he has won all of them. But just barely.

The Plumbing Problem

Cleanliness is next to godliness. A principle high amongst the canonical statements of modern medicine. Handwashing, clean clothes, sterile environments. These things save lives, preventing transmission of the great beasts of the hospital, the resistant nosocomial infection. When we wash our hands, clean our coats, spray down the keyboards we protect everyone we interact with from the hybridized super-strep that plagues the old and the infirm in hospitals worldwide.

It is good that we do this, as we do see a myriad of folks whose immune systems and bodies are poorly equipped to handle a new round of infections. But, oddly enough, it seems counter-productive for this obsession with clean to spread to the general population. Hundreds of years ago, Polio was endemic, but not problematic. Everyone had it, everyone had been exposed in their early childhood, when the maternal gift of a temporary immune system had served as a gold plated shield. It spread through the unappealingly named fecal-oral route (as do a number of diseases that we have ALL had...disturbing as that thought may be), and in the days before modern plumbing, everyone was heavily exposed.

It was with the advent of modern plumbing that polio emerged as the disease we know today, the paralytic invader leaving crippled children in its wake. Without constant exposure, people were not encountering polio until after the maternal antibodies had worn off, leaving them a virgin field, just waiting for polio to colonize. Oddly enough, it was the widespread improvement of sanitation, then end of defecating in a hole in the ground, that sparked an epidemic of crippling disease.

They call this the hygiene hypothesis now, the concern that our over-hygenic society may be protecting infants from disease precisely when they should be encountering it the most, at the peak of their childhood immune potency. We are born with a surfeit of antibodies, a gift from our mothers, but they fade, leaving an undeveloped system behind. Polio is only one example of the viruses that once went ignored, and now cause epidemics. Perhaps, this theory posits, we should let our children wallow in the muck.