Pandemic (The Extinction Files, #1)

by A.G. Riddle

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.

Much of the science included in PANDEMIC is real. In particular, research regarding the M13 phage and GP3 protein is 100% factual.

Worldwide, over two hundred million people were infected with malaria each year, and nearly half a million died from the disease. Ninety percent of those deaths took place in Africa, where a child died of malaria every minute.

On average, Ebola killed half of those it infected. Even when the body’s immune system defeated the disease itself, the diarrhea during its acute phase was often fatal due to dehydration.

a silver lapel pin. It featured a rod with a serpent wrapped around it—the traditional symbol of medicine known as the Rod of Asclepius, most frequently seen inside the six-pointed Star of Life on ambulances.

At her office, she began prepping for the deployment. Her duffel bag contained the essentials for any outbreak investigation: clothes, toiletries, a satellite GPS, sunblock, gowns, gloves, goggles, a portable projector, and MREs—meals ready-to-eat. The MREs were particularly essential for outbreaks in the third world; often the local food and water harbored the very pathogen they were fighting.

ZMapp was the only available treatment for Ebola; it had been successful in treating several physicians who contracted the disease in 2014, but had yet to undergo human clinical trials. Its effects were largely unknown.

Berlin was a sprawling city that covered over 340 square miles—larger than New York City and nine times the size of Paris.

The key to stopping an outbreak was containment. The first step in containment was to isolate anyone who was infected, and the second step was to interview all the infected patients and develop a list of every person they had come into contact with—a process called contact tracing.

Time was of the essence; in most cases, the first few days of an outbreak determined everything after.

If Peyton and her team did their job correctly, they’d end up with a contact tree that eventually had a root contact: the first person to contract the disease, often called patient zero or the index case.

The EIS program was a two-year fellowship established at the CDC in 1951. It had begun as a Cold War initiative focused on bioterror. Today it was one of the most prestigious and sought-after fellowships in applied epidemiology, known for producing the world’s best disease detectives.

When she needed to rest, she closed her eyes, refused to let her mind think, and instead focused on her breathing. She first forced herself to draw her breaths into her belly, allowing her abdomen to expand, not her chest. With each exhalation, she focused on the tip of her nose, where the breath touched as it flowed out of her, and counted the breaths. She rarely got past forty.

the average Ebola case fatality rate is fifty percent.

there are five known strains of Ebola: Zaire, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Bundibugyo, and Reston.

Zaire ebolavirus is the worst, killing up to ninety percent of those it infects.

Ebola and other filoviruses are all zoonotic—they jump from animals to humans and back. Zoonotic infections are a huge issue in central Africa.

we’re almost certain that African fruit bats harbor the virus without symptoms.

In 2004, an Israeli researcher named Beka Solomon was conducting Alzheimer’s trials when she stumbled onto a new therapy that reduced the brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s by an astounding eighty percent. That made it far more effective than any treatment on the market.

M13 was a special type of virus called a bacteriophage—a virus that infected only bacteria. And M13 infected only one type of bacteria: Escherichia coli, or E. coli. To Solomon’s surprise, the antibody, when attached to M13, showed great success in her trials.

After years of research, scientists discovered it was actually a set of proteins—called GP3—on the tip of the M13 virus that was the key to its incredible ability.

Around the world, disease is the one enemy that unites every person of every race and nationality. When a pandemic occurs, we come together in a single, species-wide cause.

“In the third century, the Antonine Plague wiped out a third of Europe’s population. And just when population levels were recovering, the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century killed almost half of all Europeans; up to fifty million people died from what we believe was bubonic plague. “In the 1340s, the Plague once again remade Europe, forever changing the course of world history.

Twenty-five years later, a mysterious viral hemorrhagic fever killed fifteen million—roughly eighty percent of their population at the time. Imagine that: a mysterious illness killing eight out of every ten people. In America, that would be over 240 million people. It’s unthinkable, but it happened, right here in North America, less than five hundred years ago. We still haven’t identified the pathogen that decimated Mexico in the sixteenth century, but we do know it returned twenty years later, in 1576, following two years of drought. It killed another two million from the already decimated population. To this day, we still have very few clues about what caused that pandemic. Most importantly, we don’t know if or when it will return.”

“1918. The Spanish Flu. Or, as it’s more recently known, the 1918 Flu Epidemic. Less than one hundred years ago. Estimates are that one in every three people around the world contracted the pathogen.

Off the Horn of Africa, the cargo vessel Kentaro Maru was slowly making its way down the coast of Somalia toward Kenya. It kept its distance from the shore, and out of the reach of pirates, though it was well equipped to repel such attacks.

“What is the Looking Glass?” he asked. “According to you, it’s a project that has been going on for over two thousand years. A scientific endeavor on a scale the world has never seen before. You said the greatest scientific minds in history, across generations, had been working on the Looking Glass, and that it was near completion.

You said there were three components of the Looking Glass: Rook, Rendition, and Rapture.”

The World Health Organization and Health Canada operate an early warning system for pandemics. The system is called the Global Public Health Information Network, or GPHIN for short, and it has saved countless millions of lives.

SARS

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus—MERS-CoV—before it went global.

“Does that mean we’re relaxing the bush meat policy to dine with the natives on Thursday?” “Yes, but only for you, Dr. Stevens. The featured dish will be Fruit Bat Meatloaf. I’ve heard it’s to die for.”

CoVid19 - holy mackerelly.

She assumed that the hotel washed the sheets regularly but figured the comforters were rarely cleaned, just wiped off and left to collect all manner of germs and bugs from hundreds of guests each year. So she took the comforter off the queen size bed she would sleep in and placed it on the dresser. She definitely didn’t want it near her face.

All things can be repaired, Peyton. Some simply require more time than others.”

unknown viral hemorrhagic fever?

Day 3 32,000 Infected 41 Dead

The disease had started with a pain in his neck, and a fever. He had felt fine otherwise. But a few hours later, his body was turning itself inside out. He vomited nearly everything he ate. The diarrhea emptied his bowels the moment any morsel reached them, then reached for more, like a hose sucking his insides out.

Life is uncertain; in the end we control only a single thing: our own thoughts.

He vowed that if he became well, he would cherish every day. And although he had never wished ill health on another person, there and then he wondered if every physician might benefit from being sick—really sick—just once.

an old Indian proverb: A healthy person has a hundred wishes, but a sick person has only one.

Whatever the Mandera strain was, it began as a respiratory disease, then progressed into a hemorrhagic fever. It was the ultimate killer—a virus that was highly infectious in the days after contraction, then extremely deadly shortly thereafter.

“What’s a TBR list?” “A to-be-read list.” “Oh. I don’t have a list,”

Located inside Kenya, just sixty miles from the Somali border, it was the largest refugee settlement in the world, home to more than three hundred thousand people, many barely surviving. Over eighty percent of the residents were women and children, and nearly all of them were Somali nationals who had fled the drought and wars in Somalia that had lasted for years.

Finally, they settled on a set of recommendations. They suggested that the Kenyans separate the camp into four separate sections: a quarantine area for suspected cases, an isolation zone for confirmed cases, and two support camps. The first support camp would house personnel who had come into contact with potentially infected individuals. The second support camp would be for workers with no contact with the pathogen. Workers from the safe camp would unload transports and conduct any interactions with people from outside the camps.

Day 4 1,200,000 Infected 500 Dead

She fought to keep her voice even. “How many cases?” “Over a million in Asia, another million in Europe. Maybe two hundred thousand in South America so far. But we think there are a lot more. We’ve got half a million cases here in the US, but we’re getting updated stats from state health departments so we expect that number to climb.” It was officially a pandemic.

DAY 5 50,000,000 Infected 12,000 Dead

“We see only one predictable path,” the white-haired scientist said. “A brain biopsy.”

At work, keeping her emotions in check was imperative. Emotions clouded judgment, changed how a person looked at things.

Her symptoms had stabilized, but he was still terrified that the virus she and so many others had contracted was in fact the same virus that had already killed thousands in Kenya.