The following is a fictitious scenario
Sixty kilometers north of Boca do Acre, deep in the Amazon rainforest, the headman of a nearby unexplored Indian settlement was returning home after a rare visit to white man’s territory. He had traveled many miles by dugout canoe and on foot, in order to barter native gold for a breeding rooster that would enable them to improve the clan’s flock.
Before embarking on his homeward journey, Quizo had contracted a strain of H1N1 influenza. An hour’s march from his village, the precious rooster had sickened and died.
It succumbed to a highly pathogenic sub-strain of H5N1 bird flu.
Quizo was mortified at the prospect of reporting this failure to his people, so he gutted and de-feathered the bird; he built a fire and roasted the carcass, charring the outside while the inner flesh remained uncooked.
He then ate the fowl – and aggravated his existing illness by contracting bird flu.
Up until that moment there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the virus, and those that had occurred had been in small clusters within a single family. Transmission between the members had occurred through close personal contact with each other, and had not spread beyond the household. However, the one event that terrified scientist’s worldwide, was the occurrence of an antigenic shift in the virus.
It was remotely possible for this type of shift to occur through the mixing of human influenza A and animal influenza A virus genes … to create a new strain of human influenza. The worse case scenario would happen if the newly mutated sub-form of H5N1 could be spread easily from person-to-person in a sustained manner.
The virus that mutated in Quizo’s body had aerosol capabilities. In other words, it could be transmitted through minute droplets of airborne fluid – and it had the potential of causing a global pandemic.
The last Flu pandemic had occurred in 1918, spreading as far as the Arctic and to remote Pacific islands, despite the absence of modern air travel. It had been the worst medical holocaust in history, with a mortality rate of somewhere between 3% and 20%.
It caused the deaths of over 100 million people.
The difference between then and now was incalculable, for two reasons: Modern global air travel … and the fact that the human mortality rate from existing strains of H5N1 was in excess of 60%. However, because of genetic scrambling, the virus was capable of grabbing huge blocks of genetic code from human flu viruses through a process called reassortment. The antigenic shift that occurred in Quizo’s body produced an entirely new sub-strain of H5N1.
This particular sub-strain had a potential human infection rate of 74,8%.This meant that over 74% 0f the global population – almost 5 billion people, were at risk, for two reasons: The human body had no natural defenses against the virus, and there was no effective vaccine available against this new virulent strain.
If the mortality rate of 60% held, over 2,8 billion people were doomed.
Mankind would be driven back to the Stone Age.
Quizo staggered into his village an hour after consuming the chicken. The following morning, he was coughing and sneezing uncontrollably. He summoned the medicine man and the concerned tribesmen gathered to watch as the shaman performed his wizardry.
The headman’s immune system started fighting the pathogens, causing cytokines to signal immune cells, both T-cells and macrophages, causing them to travel to the site of the infection in the lungs. This triggered an uncontrollable feedback loop, which created a cytokine storm. This, in turn, made the macrophages accumulate, causing massive hemorrhaging in the lungs and other organs.
Quizo died seven hours later. He was either drowned in his own blood, or he succumbed to massive multiple organ failure … or both.
The world was spared by two factors.Within 24 hours, every living human being in the village was dead … and an untended cooking fire burned the settlement to the ground, wiping out the last visages of the virus.
However, the clock was ticking …
platopus
