He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.
Suddenly he goes into the last phase—the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has crashed and bled out. Or more p...
Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted thei...
Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered. A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out, he said. A scream cut the air. It s...
Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.
An amount of bot tox the size of the dot over this i would be enough to easily kill ten people. Bot tox is a nerve agent. It is one hundred thousand times more toxic than Sarin, the nerve gas that the...
The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean-Congo. Sindbis. O’nyongnyong. Nameless São Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.
The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughte...
The boy swelled up, and his skin filled with pockets of blood. In some places, the skin almost separated from the underlying tissue. This happened during the last phase, while he was on the respirator...
Virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath.
We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.
On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worke...
My virologist friends are always bioengineering viruses. I could see a bioengineered strain of smallpox getting into a terrorist’s hands, and that’s my fear. And then when we get a terrorist attack wi...
And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, Chance favors the prepared mind.
Bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clo...
They get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as...
Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants. Many of the giant trees I describe in this b...
In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by lett...
I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment, and he offered to pick up the sick man i...
He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fill...
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