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I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of the soul, which I can compare to no earthly sensation… - Edgar Allan Poe * There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy - William Shakespeare * No Man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. - Mary Wollstonecraft * Tell me the news, again, whatever it is... sorrow and I are hardly strangers. I can bear the worst. ― Sophocles






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Transmission Vector
Topic Started: Sep 4 2015, 05:33 PM (319 Views)
Dr. Jason Singh Barar
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Jason glanced again at his patient's medical chart. He didn't need to- he'd gone over and over it until he'd practically memorized the damn thing. But, it was better than looking into his patient's sunken, jaundiced face.

"Well, Mr. Aimone" Jason finally said, "You've definitely caught something. Until we get the blood cultures back from the lab, though, there's no way to be sure exactly what it is you caught." That was a blatant lie. Jason knew exactly what was wrong with Marcello Aimone- the same thing that was wrong with Veronica Meoli, two nights ago; Yellow Fever.

"That being said, there are some treatments that I think might help. We'll begin those immediately." That at least was the truth. Marcello nodded weakly. He looked worse than Veronica when she arrived in the ER, and she barely pulled through. This particular strain of Yellow Fever was vicious.

"Now, before I leave you in Nurse Fraticelli's capable hands, I would like to try and determine where you might have been infected. Were you doing anything unusual? Were you in contact with anybody who might have been sick?"

Marcello shook his head weakly. “I was working all week on a project. The only time I went out at all was to the club on Saturday.”

Veronica had gone to several clubs regularly before she'd gotten sick. That could be a coincidence. But it was the only connection between his patients that Jason had found. He reached for a notepad.

“You wouldn't happen to remember the name and address of this club, would you, Mr. Aimone?”

———

Jason's shift at the ER ended an hour later. He'd started the microbiological culture with some of the blood sample he'd taken from Marco, and pocketed the rest. He had a few tests of his own to run later.

Yellow Fever. One case might have been a freak occurrence; two was dangerously close to a pattern. The last thing he needed was for these infections to reach the headlines. For starters, that would mean a nightmare for Benedetta Santini, Secretary of Turin's Department of Health, and Jason’s erstwhile ally. A yellow Fever-induced panic could tie up Santini's departmental resources for months, or even cause her to lose her job. That Jason could not allow; he had a mission here in Turin, and Santini's resources were currently the best way to go about completing it. In any event, there was little chance of hiding the two cases of yellow fever in the Ospedale Maria Vittoria's emergency ward. What Jason could do was try and prevent any more infections occurring.

According to Jason's medical textbooks, yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitos- except Jason doubted there were any infected mosquitos flying around Turin. And neither of his patients recalled any mosquito bites within the last week.

Mosquitos aren't the only bloodsuckers here though, are they? Jason thought to himself with a grim chuckle.

Maybe the outbreak was a freak occurrence. Or maybe one of Turin's recently arrived vampires was spreading a deadly disease. One way or another, Jason intended to find out. And if it was a vampire, Jason intended to try and stop them somehow, before anybody else was infected.
Edited by Dr. Jason Singh Barar, Sep 4 2015, 06:14 PM.

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[alias=Storyteller]As Jason was absorbed in his thoughts, pondering over the plausibility of his suspicion, a buzz came to his ears, a noise of tiny wings moving frantically. If Jason had decided to look, he would have seen nothing but a common fly - not a mosquito, especially not one of those that could transmit yellow fever. Aedes Aegypti, Aedes Albopictus... the names came to his memory as if had been brushing up for an exam. He was pretty confident they didn't survive in the European weather. Or did they? He was in Italy now, were the conditions the same as in his London?

On a notebook, branded with the logo of the Hospital, he had signed the name of the club Mr. Aimone had mentioned. 21th (sic) Century Palace, it was called. Was it in the list of clubs Veronica had visited? The name, indeed, sounded familiar, and certainly not because of personal experience. His patient hadn't been able to remember the address, but a quick check on his smartphone could easily fix that lacuna: the 21th Century Palace, also referred to by aficionados as 21CP, was apparently a fairly popular club not far from Corso Novara, in the northern part of Quartiere Aurora.

Simply by glancing at the map that Google had provided him, he could see a parking lot not far from there, nameless blocks and industrial sheds, and on the corner of the screen the squared shape of the old monumental cemetery of Turin.

Behind him, once more, came the familiar buzz of the fly.
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Dr. Jason Singh Barar
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As Jason settled behind the wheel and slid the key into the ignition slot, he paused to consider what he was about to do. He had no evidence that it was a vampire infecting people with yellow fever. And by asking around after Marcello and Veronica, he'd technically be breaching their doctor-patient confidentiality. That, more than anything else, twisted Jason's insides into a knot.

Then again, if Jason was right, he was the only person who could explore this line of inquiry. And he did have implicit permission from his patients to investigate how they became infected, or else he would have never heard of 21CP.

More than anything else, Jason wanted this outbreak to be a problem he could solve. He could do nothing about a batch of infected mosquitos- he could do something about single source of infection- even if that source of infection was a vicious predatory monster that he currently had no way of helping or stopping.

As Jason pressed the Prius' ignition button, he couldn't decide whether or not he wished his hunch was correct.

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