Nipah was passing horizontally through the community, like a rumor, not just down from the sky, like a divine curse or a dollop of bat poop. And its seeming ubiquity was confirmed by one other finding of the combined response team. This bit of data was especially spooky. The investigators took swabs from the wall of a hospital room in which one of the patients had been treated, five weeks earlier, and from the soiled frame of a bed in which that patient had lain. None of those surfaces had been cleaned in the meantime; bleach and labor were in short supply. Some swabs, both from the wall and
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Viruses are a hardy breed
