The A.D. Pandemic Hellyear of 2043-2044: An Overview (Part 2)

WORLDNET ARCHIVES ADVISORY: the following is an excerpt from a medico-history review article written in a dry, complex style with technical terms.

Title: “Retrospective of the 2043-2044 Amazon Disease Pandemic Hellyear: the rise and fall of a death dealer.”

Author: Xenia C. Diakos, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Copenhagen, Denmark Sector, OmniEuropea.

Source: History and Medicine, vol. 2, no. 1, pp 127-172.

Date of peer-reviewed epublication: 08/11/2051.

 

[Beginning of excerpt] (…)

The death dealer also becomes a chaos-bringer

By the end of December 2043, frantic disorganization prevailed everywhere.

Hospitals were overrun by the infected and the dying, whereas a continuous stream of new patients showed up at their steps. Such a catastrophic situation was further compounded by an aggravating scarcity of medical supplies and a worsening atrophy of trained medical and paramedical personnel caused by staff abandonment of their posts, out of self-preservation or from fear of becoming infected.

For the same reasons, utilities and services, including news media, were also deteriorating. In between, intermittent waves of looting of stores and warehouses occurred everywhere, as scared people sought to stock up on as many necessities as they could grab for themselveswith police forces rendered impotent to keep order not only on account of their own depletion in numbers from the disease, but also because too many derelict officers joined in the ransacking.

Overwhelmed by the mounting chaos, the unraveling governments of the world faced no choice but to bypass national emergency measures and impose martial law, relying on their disciplined, as well as preemptively biohazard-prepared, armed forces for the containment of the spreading disease and the maintenance of order.

Although the activated armed forces managed to establish and enforce numerous quarantine zones, along with helping beleaguered civilian disaster-management agencies in setting up secure and disease-free refugee camps, the earlier governing failures to ban ground travel had aided and abetted the explosion of fresh A.D. outbreaks that were, by then, occurring at a staggering rate. As a result, the military and relief agencies found themselves unable to efficiently contain the expanding dispersion of A.D.

In addition, the increasing frequency of out-of-control mobs that sought to break out of quarantine zones left the armed forces little choice but to fall back into entrenched positions aimed at preserving established quarantined perimeters, thus leaving them unable to enforce dusk-to-dawn curfews anywhere. Even worse, troves of infected and non-infected people were fleeing new outbreak areas to settle in disease-free areas or to seek succor in the refugee camps: this resulted in countless groups of hapless human beings wandering around the countryside, in addition to furthering P. amazonia’s spread and death count.

The containment threshold had long been passed, and there could be no more denying of the raging tempest’s will to bring ruin upon the world.

... And then came the darkness and its terror

By early January 2044, every country on the planet was under assault by P. amazonia in various degrees of infiltration and deathly blossoming. With mass panic reigning the world over, armed forces struggled with too much on their plate, whereas the collapse of governments was well underway. Through it all, puttering distribution pipelines of victuals were crumpling into non-existence. In between, as garbage and the rotting dead piled up everywhere to aggravate the prevailing unsanitary conditions, oncoming famine had begun to creep in—even more so in the quarantine areas.

From there, the decelerating wheels of civilization found themselves on the brink of coming off their axles, as everything that greased and powered them—food production and delivery, water treatment and dissemination, power generation and distribution, to name but these—underwent catastrophic failure.

And thus, the world dimmed into complete darkness by the end of January 2044: no more television, no more internet, no more phones, and no more light. The formerly globalized and interconnected, light-shining modern world of Homo sapiens sapiens had disintegrated precipitously into a multiplicity of isolated pockets of bereft, scared, angry, hopeless, and ostensibly doomed, Humanity.

Incidentally, it was around that same fateful month when P. amazonia, having already proven its mettle as an implacable foe of H. sapiens sapiens, started to see a sudden expansion of the deathly toll it kept arrogating from Humanity – all thanks to an eager helping hand from the very same humans the microorganism sought to infect and exploit lethally.

With stores emptied by looting, along with foodstuffs and clean water reaching scarcity, famine and dehydration had become persistent companions that gnawed at uninfected people trapped in the quarantine zones. Coupled with the daily sight of the dying and the decomposing dead—whether from A.D., starvation, drinking fouled water, temperature exposure, or overall rampant unsanitary conditions—this led in turn to the inevitable awakening of the raging beast that had been slumbering tamely within every still-enduring human being until then.

Hence, posses and gangs began to war against each other for hoarded victuals, territory, or bigoted tribalism, fighting with anything usable as a weapon. Adding to this blooming ball of violence, pockets of vicious religious fundamentalist enclaves concomitantly budded all over the world with zealot-believers proclaiming themselves as ‘holy warriors’ of their God of upbringing in what they perceived as the ‘Judgement Days’, or ‘End-Times’.

At the same time, and with self-preservation having become the all-encompassing rule, every neighborhood constituted fair game for rampaging pillagers and religious zealots alike. This meant allies regularly turned on allies, neighbors often fought against neighbors, and friends callously betrayed friends. Dwellings were consequently assaulted, vandalized, ransacked, or burned, with those occupants that failed to escape being either massacred or left for dead.

The human condition having devolved to such a bleak state, people would slaughter one another for a recovered can of cocktail Vienna sausages or anything else deemed edible. Deadly clashes over the rampant poaching of farm animals were recurrent. Even cats and dogs wound up hunted down as sustenance worth fighting for; the same applied to any small animal that could be caughtfrom birds to squirrels, with mice and rats included.

Except for disease-free refugee camps which were victuals-stocked and under military protection, such a state of things proved equally horrific outside of the quarantined areasthanks largely to roving bands of ferocious raiders busying themselves at ransacking any locale they could reach by vehicle or by foot, when not otherwise engaged in open war against each other, or killing one another through infighting. Some of these marauders even went as far as to assault refugee camps, for all they invariably met defeat in the face of the heavily armed soldiers that defended the enclosed havens. However, such reckless attacks nevertheless put in the crossfire the masses of desperate people awaiting to be screened for admittance into the protected and disease-free sanctuaries, consequently adding further to the Grim Reaper’s tally. And in between, the terrified non-infected dispatched, without hesitation, anyone with the barest of cold-like symptoms.

From there, this widespread barbarism would harvest its substantial share of deaths undeterred during the ensuing two months, only to be equaled by a staunchly competitive P. amazonia. To this effect, instances of cannibalism had grown significantly throughout the world by mid-February.

Thus, the inhumanity carried on unperturbed and unopposeduntil very late in the month of March 2044.

The light fights back

Having at last come up with a practical solution to stifle the prevailing barbaric anarchy, what remained of the governments of the world directed their respective military to conscript from the refugee camps every able man and woman, between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five, and train them into deputized militias under their commandwith the ultimatum of either accepting the draft or being thrown out, along with family members, if any.

At the same time, those still waiting for admission outside of the refuges were presented with a fast-track entry for themselves and anyone accompanying them, on the strict condition that all those able had to likewise accept being drafted into deputized militias, whereas refusal meant permanent rejection from the protected, disease-free, and victuals-stocked sanctuaries.

(…) [End of excerpt.]

 

(Continued in Part 3. Read Part 1 here, if you haven't already)

 

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The contents of Psiarch's Hideout are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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The A.D. Pandemic Hellyear of 2043-2044: An Overview (Part 1)

WORLDNET ARCHIVES ADVISORY: the following is an excerpt from a medico-history review article written in a dry, complex style with technical terms.

Title: “Retrospective of the 2043-2044 Amazon Disease Pandemic Hellyear: the rise and fall of a death dealer.”

Author: Xenia C. Diakos, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Copenhagen, Denmark Sector, OmniEuropea.

Source: History and Medicine, vol. 2, no. 1, pp 127-172.

Date of peer-reviewed epublication: 08/11/2051.

 

[Beginning of excerpt] (…) the center stage belongs primarily to the infamous protist responsible for the modern culling of Humanity through the Amazon Disease (A.D.), a unicellular organism which goes by the phylogenic classification name of Protocystis amazonia. However, to grasp fully the protozoan’s historic impact, one must track the sequence of events marked by its discovery and biomedical understanding in concert with the circumstances that underlined the emergence and spread of the pandemic it causedthe deadliest in recorded history.

How it all began

The then-existing World Health Organization (W.H.O.) first identified the infectious impact of P. amazonia as the ‘Thrombogenic Manifold Emboli Syndrome’ (T-MES) in July 2043. Then a brand new infectious disease of unknown agency appearing out of the Brazilian deforested parts of the Amazon rainforest, this syndrome distinguished itself by massive blood clotting resulting in rapid death by congestion of all vascular vessels of the body. 

The symptoms and course of T-MES are a matter of historical medical record. Early symptoms are deceptively innocuous over the first two days after infection, consisting of nothing more than a light fever, some fatigue, and intermittent coughing and wheezing. Although the light fever dissipates during the third day, the other symptoms grow in intensity as patients additionally suffer loss of appetite and difficulties in breathing. By the fourth day, the infected are nearly moribund; in addition, they experience loss of consciousness and intermittent seizures.  By the fifth day, they become comatose whereas the heart undergoes recurrent arrhythmia and the kidneys shut down; at the same time, forced oxygenation of froth-filling lungs is necessary to sustain shallow breathingat best. In the end, on the sixth day, the heart suffers terminal arrest with the circulating blood having turned into a slushy and clumpy, clot-filled goo. At the time, all the known medical interventions designed to dissolve blood clots were overwhelmed by such a swift and massive formation of an uncanny multiplicity of blood clots throughout the vascular system in just six days.

Unfortunately, Brazil initially shrugged off the W.H.O.’s warnings of an epidemic. Whether the health organization failed to impress upon Brasília the urgency of the situation because of incompetence on its part or that of the Brazilian government, or both, remains open to debateregardless, internal W.H.O. memos indicate the organization undertook in those early days preparatory measures for a global emergency, on account of its awareness of the unreceptiveness to health warnings of governments fixated on short-term budgetary considerations and economic interests, coupled with its in-house analytics of the frequency of emerging cases in Brazil which projected an immense potential for T-MES to become a wildfire-type pandemic. 

To this effect, the number of T-MES cases among Brazilians had exploded by November 2043. With the disease spreading unchecked, the W.H.O. had no choice but to officially declare T-MES an epidemic with a high risk of devolving quickly into a pandemic. At the same time, again as indicated by internal memos, various W.H.O.-affiliated physicians and scientists throughout the world were already working to not only identify the infectious agent responsible for the disease, but also gather insights into its mode of propagation.

Finally, realizing it had been caught off-guard by shortsightedness, the government in Brasília responded at last, but with a demonstrated lack of preparation and gross disorganization. Meanwhile, news about the Brazilian T-MES epidemic was spreading throughout the world: in turn, it did not take long for the syndrome to become known as the ‘Amazon Disease’, the ‘Blood Clotting Disease’, or the ‘Blood Curdling Disease’.

Notwithstanding the syndrome’s frightful impressions on the collective human imagination, all other governments of the world welcomed W.H.O.’s warning with dubiousness, citing unwarranted alarmism and past ‘overblown pandemic scares’ as rationalization. Instead, they reassured their populations with confident platitudes while refusing to waste personnel and money screening travelers for "signs of a basic cold"—as a result, they failed to recognize, or refused to acknowledge, the disease's seemingly benign, and thus insidious, early symptoms. In effect, this constituted W.H.O.’s worst-case scenario, as described in those internal memos.

Genesis of the death dealer

A month later, the culprit for T-MES was finally identified and its life-cycle uncovered. As it turned out, the origin of the Amazon Disease constituted a tale in two acts.

The story begins with Protocystis rodentia, a non-lethal protozoan parasite of rodent dwellers of the Amazon rainforest. Being transmitted through the saliva of various tick species, it lodges itself into the connective tissues of the infected mammals to form single-celled cysts to slumber, occasionally drawing nutrients to divide by meiosis and form gametocytes. These would be subsequently released into the blood stream to be picked back up by other feeding ticks, thereafter fusing with likewise-ingested gametocyte counterparts to generate new P. rodentia unicellular individuals ready and waiting to be transmitted in turn. 

Fortunately for Homo sapiens sapiens, especially for the lumberjacks, farmers, and villagers that had encroached on the sprawling Brazilian deforested areas, P. rodentia proved no match for the human immune system and, consequently, remained harmless and unnoticed.

Thanks to ever progressive deforestation, however, the increased contact between humans and Amazonian ticks amplified the exposure of the protist to human physiology: as a result, this imposed a natural selective pressure on it to adapt and better withstand the immune system of its new recurring host. Hence, after more than half a century of such selective drive, a newly-evolved relative of P. rodentia emerged to end the first act of the tale and bring about the second onestarring Protocystis amazonia.

The adaptive changes that characterize P. amazonia, and which make it so deadly to humans, rest primarily upon three single-base pair mutations within a gene that encodes one of its proteases. Proteases are enzymes that cut away at other proteins; they comprise a part of a microorganism’s arsenal of ‘forks and knives’ that allows it to derive nutrients from its host, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Named ‘fibrinogenase’, this mutated protease of P. amazonia is not only kept at its cell surface but also cleaves precisely the blood-circulating protein fibrinogen to convert it into its clot-forming active formnamely fibrin, the main substance blood clots are made of. Furthermore, P. amazonia’s fibrinogenase cuts human fibrinogen only and not that of other animal species. In any case, once P. amazonia enters the human circulatory system through the saliva of a carrier tick, its fibrinogenase starts converting fibrinogen into fibrin, which, in turn, ends up cocooning it within micro-blood clots. 

Incidentally, with evolution being an imperfect process, this ability of P. amazonia to envelop itself with fibrin confers both advantages and drawbacks. On the one hand, this ‘fibrin shell’ provides protection from the human immune defenses, thus enabling its circulation unhindered in the blood stream while drawing nutrients from said blood to multiply by mitosis. Similarly, its fibrin coating also greatly reduces the effectiveness of protozoan-specific antibiotics, such as paromomycin, by acting as a physical barrier that keeps the microorganism out of their reach. Additionally, the micro-blood clots surrounding P. amazonia individuals enable them to leave passively the blood stream at the gas-exchanging interfaces of lung capillaries and alveoli, subsequently entering the lungs and producing an irritation of the airways which, in turn, causes a coughing reflex to expulse those same micro-blood clots. As a result, P. amazonia becomes airborne as its fibrin shell allows it to survive long enough to infect other human beings by inhalation, or by inert penetration through skin pores (Note: the same applies for direct contact with blood from an infected patient).

On the other hand, this very same fibrin cocoon prevents the microorganism from leaving the blood stream and crossing over to its host’s connective tissues in order to form cysts and produce gametocytes. As a consequence, P. amazonia is robbed of its means of gene pool diversification by sexual reproduction. Furthermore, with one of the causes of blood clotting being previously formed blood clots, the fibrin shells of individual P. amazonia inevitably grow in thickness and wind up imprisoning it, subsequently hampering its ability to multiply by mitosis, in addition to removing any further opportunities for diffusing out of the host’s blood stream and into the lungs. Lastly, the multiplication of circulating P. amazonia micro-clots, along with their incremental growth in size, triggers a progressive and amplifying cascade of systemic blood clotting that ultimately traps the protist within the curdling blood of its dying host, leaving it to succumb by attrition in the wake of the latter's death.

(And thus, the highly infectious, common cold-like symptoms of the first three days, followed by the next non-infectious three days of precipitated death spiral.)

Rise of the death dealer

Within the span of less than two weeks after the W.H.O.’s disclosure of its findings on P. amazonia, a multiplicity of A.D. cases was already erupting around the world. In cities, suburbs, towns, and villages, the disease preyed on everyone: from newborns to the eldest, from the destitute to the affluent.

On the twenty-first of December 2043, the W.H.O. firmly repeated its warnings of a pending worldwide pandemic. Although receptive on the surface, the collective response of the governments of the world proved tentative, if not incompetent: whereas they mandated quarantine protocols for all hospitals and healthcare centers with A.D. patients, at the same time closing their borders and shutting down air travel, they nevertheless hesitated to prohibit public and economic ground travel; in a similar vein, they procrastinated in putting under quarantine those areas with people already afflicted by the disease.

Furthermore, their political juggling acts of disseminating critical information about A.D., while in concert demeaning the danger it represented to reassure their populaces and avoid panic, resulted in sowing confusion on the gravity of the situation. In concert, this fostered a mistaken sense of lack of emergency within the public and private sector spheres. 

(It must be pointed out that, at the time, too many people remembered the relatively smaller-scale pandemic of twenty-three years earlier, which was characterized by back and forth confinement versus non confinement directives, the incompetent denials of the efficiency of wearing face masks followed by the justified imposition to wear them, curfews enacted and revoked in repetition, the consequent slowing down of the global economy, and the cyclic panic-driven hoarding of goods. Therefore, the governments of the world sought to conserve appearances by opting for the equivalent of tap dancing around the alarming truths of A.D. while simultaneously enacting the wrong lessons from past pandemics.)

In any case, these precarious and worsening circumstances were exacerbated by a dysfunctional coordination between all levels of governance in every country, from rural to federal. As a result, legions of misinformed individuals went about their regular business, such as shopping, commuting, working, clubbing, or driving off to visit relatives, all the while paying little heed to the W.H.O.’s recommended health precautions.

In short, in all countries of the world, the expansion of P. amazonia’s reach was facilitated and prolonged unduly. Case in point: the numbers of infected, dying, and deceased were increasing exponentially everywhere a mere week after the W.H.O.’s reiterated warnings of an impending pandemic.

In between, as revealed again by internal memos, W.H.O. had in foresight already mobilized discreetly its worldwide affiliated scientists, physicians, research staff, and care-providing personnel, having secluded them in designated, autonomous, and secure research facilities under the military protection of their respective countries, to undertake in earnest a collaborative search for an A.D. cure.

The death dealer also becomes a chaos-bringer

By the end of December 2043, frantic disorganization prevailed everywhere (…)  [End of excerpt.]

 

(Continued in Part 2)


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© PHV (Registration no. 1168315)

Psiarch® PHV

 Creative Commons License
The contents of Psiarch's Hideout are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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