Archive for the ‘Viral Times: Novel’ Category
Readying for a Health Camp Break-In
By Dayton Winstead
Austin, November 29, 2021
While the rains fall, we fall back in retreat from disease.
I type those words into my ScribePad and wipe sweat off my brow. I’m sweltering in my apartment while my Condo Cooler is forced to idle. I’m not supposed to be home now, a journalist writing in his private journal while the sun sets on a Texas hot with climate and viruses. Government clocks cycle our energy to restrain the temperature. But in these times, nothing we’ve tried controls the viruses.
They fall on us from the skies in rainstorms and leap between us in casual touch. These times have caused love to fail. A half-century ago people had sex–dad would say make love in one of his editorials–with no fears if they used simple precaution. Even when I grew up, sexual disease needed blood to cross between bodies. But HIVE-5 is more aggressive than its viral ancestors. It enters the body while you battle the New Flu, a disease with an airborne range of 10 feet that’s soared into a 19-month pandemic. Nobody gets close now without designer masks, antiviral clothes, viro-screen gel. In the ultimate of social distancing, the lucky ones can suit up and go virtual for sex. Secure Sex, they call it, now breeding faster than mosquitos in a holding pond.
I write to disinfect myself from my mission tomorrow and so I leave behind this record.
First the Flu, then HIV, and at the last, AIDS Ultra. Can love survive the terrors of touch? Nobody has an answer yet, although the new Simulation Suits mimic touch to make sex safe again. General Connectrics owns the field of haptics, gamingtouch technology grown up to serve sex.
Real sex now means death, not joy or peace or rest, or even work. Germs work to kill off sex with an AIDS any man or woman can catch. Small bugs bust up large towns and break down long lives. Have sex and die, or don’t and feel your heart grow cold.
I can’t push that kind of writing past my editor Roni at Viral Times, my latest media outlet. I skip work tonight to write this testimony. Tomorrow I have to risk everything on a mission I can’t dodge, to try to break into the Government Health Camp outside Waco. The camps pen up the infected. Healthland Security says the detentions ensure national security. I report these official lies because they need light to wither. Read the rest of this entry »
Politics play a role in curing an epidemic
For good or for ill, politics can be part of the prescription for stopping an epidemic. Policies can permit a nation’s resources to play a role in the healing. In Viral Times, a battered country permits drug testing to take on a swifter pace, hoping for a cure to HIVE-5. The drug doesn’t emerge, but others do. Fear ensures the loss of civil liberties, more swiftly than pharma research yields a new drug. The government permits those losses, too.
In our current day it appears that politics has at least helped to stem the tide of Ebola. More specifically, the virus has disappeared from our media coverage by this week. One week after the US midterm elections, Ebola stopped scaring us all. Cases are still on the rise in Africa. We’ve created no drugs to stop Ebola. It’s just gone underground, somehow, since nobody in office can profit by calling for more government resources.
Shepard Smith of Fox News (not kidding here) broadcast the best three minutes of news coverage about Ebola during the pandemic panic
. He noted that the party in power during an epidemic needs to be seen taking action, while the party out of power needs to be seen calling for investigations about the lack of virus-protection resource. Now that the GOP controls both houses of the Congress, we’ll watch to see how much more our government can do to protect us in our current viral times.
West Nile Virus on the rise in Texas
In my home here in Austin, we’re hearing reports about a rising number of infections from the West Nile Virus. The mosquito population here never carried this disease, at least not until this year. Now there’s been seven reported infections in the Austin area, and at least one death statewide. A few people in my family are scared.
What’s notable is that the warnings and reports include the word epidemic. One doctor said he’d never seen an epidemic like this in Texas. He’s relying on a definition of the word that people who’ve seen Contagion may not understand — but it’s not the right term. An epidemic is a series of infections which are high in number across a geographic area. The number of infections, in total, doesn’t create an epidemic. You need a concentrated geographic area.
He may have been using comparative thinking, but seven infections among a Texas population of more than 15 million — anybody who gets a mosquito bite could be infected — well, that’s not a high number. Not high enough for an epidemic. Under one definition, an epidemic has to spread quickly, too. An epidemic is in a concentrated geographic area. We’re hearing our reports about Travis County. But that’s only seven reports.
Our world endured an H1N1 pandemic over the past two years. That’s an infection across vast geographic areas, though not necessarily high in overall numbers. Despite that official UN health organization’s designation, the 2010-11 infections didn’t change the world’s physical contact between persons, or reshape laws about sanitation and disinfection. Or spark a tremendous business sector devoted to protection. That’s the stuff of Viral Times — although the governments of my novel are not responding evenly, or with enough resources.
Climate changes will increase evolution of new flu strains
A report from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment says changing climate will affect the likelihood of contracting a new deadly strain of the flu. Never mind the heat — it’s the infection that will get you.
Migratory birds play a central role by giving a virus an additional opportunity to evolve
It’s the shifts between El Nino and La Nina weather that will wreak havoc with the bird migration patterns. Birds, migratory birds in particular, play a central role, by either passing a flu strain directly to humans (as in the case of H1N1) or indirectly via an intermediate host, giving the virus an additional opportunity to evolve.
The El Niño-La Niña oscillations cause significant changes in regional rainfall rates and wind patterns, which in turn affect the migration pattern of birds. And these shifts lead to different groups of of bird species coming into contact with each other in a given region, allowing for new strains of influenza to develop that eventually jump to humans.
In Viral Times, birds are an active transmission agent in the spread of the New Flu and other viruses. The dominant breeds of birds, especially starlings and crows, are among the deadliest of these agents.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) refers to the state of the tropical Pacific Ocean as it sloshes back and forth, like water in a huge bathtub, west and east between Asia and the Americas. This movement affects temperatures and weather patterns worldwide.
One means to combat the infection might be to reduce use of fossil fuels. But after generations of burning coal and oil, it might be too late to reverse the Nino-Nina bathtub slosh effects. It’s back to our firewall of protection against viruses: natural immunity.
Ancient medicines you can grow or spin
An article on the Slate website interviews a medical researcher whose specialty is discovering ancient remedies to diseases. One such remedy, broccoli, was so often prescribed that the Roman leader Cato advised all residents of the city to grow their own. In one instance it appears to have been used for colon cancer treatments.
Then there’s the spider webs.
In the world of Viral Times these are the remedies pursued, tested and used by naturopathic healers like Angie Consoli, the woman who finds the prospect of recovering love that she lost in the viral pandemics which sparked AIDS Ultra. Given the right cocktail of these healing arts, diseased people without medical plans sometimes survive without pharma medicine.
A Kindness Virus, and H5N1’s Flaws
Viruses exhibit legendary behavior, especially in the power of their ability to spread. It’s one reason why something that spreads without any barriers is said to have “gone viral.” Now there’s a website that’s devoted to the concept of kindness spreading like a virus.
Good Virus has a 2-minute movie that leads you into a site that’s devoted to the mission of revealing kindness as an essential human element. We’re all infected with it.
The purpose of Good Virus is: 1) to illustrate that—contrary to what you may see, hear and read in the news—kindness is all around us (THE GOOD) and 2), to inspire people to spread that kindness (THE VIRUS). Good Virus is all about the small things, tiny acts of kindness that don’t cost a lot of money or oblige praise. The essential premise of this project is that many small acts of kindness may make more of a difference than a few big ones.
In Viral Times, one unstoppable defense against disease is love. Love breeds faith, and any faith in immunity raises the level of natural immune system defenses. A wide range of other healing arts are needed to survive a pandemic. But inducing kindness is simpler than raising the level of T-cells. Plus, the former can lead to the latter: meditation for example, shown to be an element in the increase of immunity.
If there’s a learning curve to spread the virus of kindness, nature compensates with a few barriers for disease viruses. There are natural flaws that a biological virus can exhibit in spreading. Scientists report that H1N1 doesn’t spread as effectively as a flu virus. From the journal Science we learn that aerosol transmission hasn’t been a feature of “bird flu,” the root of H5N1. Good thing.
A distinctive feature of avian influenza viruses in general, and H5N1 viruses in particular, is that they are incapable of being transmitted among humans by aerosol. Because pandemic influenza strains originated in avian influenza viruses, it can be argued that past pandemic influenza viruses were once avian influenza viruses that “learned” how to jump to and transmit by aerosol in humans.
The New Flu in Viral Times is a precursor to other disease. Nothing is more effective than the flu in propagating itself. Good Virus’s film states that scientists believe kindness spreads like a flu virus, however. So go spread a virus.
Chinese flu remedies have antiviral powers
Chinese doctors have researched 472 herbs for antiviral activity, and 10 have antiviral activity. Patinia villosa, is one of the active herbs in Eurocel, a Korean product distributed by Allegry Research Group. Eurocel is to be taken twice a day, 2-3 capsules in each dose.
In his book Viral Immunity, doctor J.E. Williams reports that the active ingredient in Patrinia is a wild perennial plant used in Japan and Korea to reduce liver toxicity. Williams treated a patient with Eurocel and said the patient’s levels of ALT (Alanine aminotransferase) were reduced by 50 percent. In healthy bodies, ALT levels in the blood are low. When the liver is damaged, ALT is released into the bloodstream. The liver, of course, is the body’s engine for eliminating toxins.
Williams’ book is one of the dozens of volumes that make up the medical foundations of Viral Times. It’s one that bears some of the most numerous colored tabs, marking significant remedies. (The Little Book of Germs is another well-thumbed guidebook I’ve used.) In the viral times of 2020 — with pharma remedies just as ineffective as ever against viruses — more affordable compounds like Eurocel (about $4 a day) are a part of the healthcare regimen for the uninsured masses. With widespread demand for these compounds, prices may drop even further during a long-term pandemic. Patents don’t exist for natural remedies, so prices are lower. But the PharmAlliance combine keeps working to discredit and block such natural remedies.
There’s plenty of groundwork for PharmAlliance in our current day. Tamiflu, one of the trade names best-known to describe oseltamivir, is controlled via patent (and so much more expensive) by Gilead Sciences. Wikipedia reports
The patent held by Gilead Sciences and is valid at least until 2016. Gilead licensed the exclusive rights to Roche in 1996. The drug does not enjoy patent protection in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and several other countries.Gilead is politically well connected: Donald Rumsfeld served as chairman from 1997 until he became U.S. Secretary of Defense in 2001; former Secretary of State George Shultz and the wife of former California Governor Pete Wilson serve on the board.
No matter how you look at it, these board members have a proven history of waging wars in the name of defense and protecting the interests of commercial investors. Given enough of a public emergency, the potential for monopoly drug ownership during a wartime against viruses will skyrocket. And so can be born the PharmAlliance, a combine of pharma and insurers.
Viral Times 