The mood here is grim. First, the rations are much more stringent than they are in New York—last night the hotel lost water completely. It was just for an hour, but still. Second, and more worrisome, everyone’s funding has been cut—again. Our third round is probably going to be announced next week. My lab is less exposed than some of the others—we only get thirty percent of our funding from the government, and the Howard Hughes Institute is making up some of the shortfall—but I’m anxious. All the Americans are talking about it between sessions: How much have you lost? Who’s stepping in to make up the difference? What’s been imperiled, or is about to be?
But the mood is grim for other, more alarming reasons, far beyond the Americans’ administrative struggles and our collective discomfort. The keynote was by two scientists from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who had done early work on the Venice outbreak of ’39, which as you know was attributed to a mutation of the Nipah virus. Their session was unusual for a number of reasons, primarily because it was more speculative than these speeches usually are. On the other hand, this has been happening with increasing frequency—when I was a doctoral student, these sorts of presentations would largely concern lab findings and would usually address a second-or third-generation mutation of one virus or another. But now there are so many new viruses that these conferences have become opportunities to elucidate reports we’ve read about on our institutions’ private networks, to which any scientist at an accredited university can upload their findings or questions. The absence of China from this network （and from the conference at large） is one of the international community’s most pressing problems, and one of the revelations from this conference—whispered from one scientist to the next—is that a group of researchers within mainland China have created a secret portal, one to which they’re uploading their own findings. My feeling is that if we know about it, so must their government, and so the information on it cannot be totally trustworthy—and yet not to take these reports seriously might lead to catastrophe.
Anyway. The Erasmus team claims to have discovered a new virus, which they claim once again originated in bats. It too is being classified as a Henipavirus, which means it’s an RNA virus that mutates at a high rate. Back in the 20th century, this Family of viruses was thought to be endemic only in Africa and Asia—though, as the ’39 outbreak proves, Nipah in particular has proven to be capable of frequent reemergence, and has inspired a good deal of research in the last seven years about its ability not only to withstand climatic changes but to adapt zoonotically in hosts—dogs, in the Italian case—it had never before infected. Though it had decimated livestock and other domesticated animals, Nipah had never been too serious a threat to us previously because it was a notably non-transmissible disease among humans, one unable to exist for more than a few days without a receptive host. By the time it did infect humans, it quickly lost steam: Transmission rates were poor, and the virus proved unable to transmit itself onward. After Venice eradicated its dog population, for example, the disease vanished as well.
But now the Erasmus team is suggesting that this new strain, which they’re calling Nipah-45, is capable not just of infecting humans but is both highly contagious and extremely fatal. Like its parent virus, it can be transmitted through contaminated food as well as by the airborne route, and unlike its evolutionary ancestor, it can exist in the host for perhaps months. Their study was of a group of small villages north of Luang Prabang, where the government has been relocating Muslim minorities who come over the border from China. According to them, six months ago the virus was responsible for the decimation of this community: almost seven thousand people dead within eight weeks. The virus switched from bat to water buffalo, and from there into the food supply. The disease manifests itself in humans as a cough, which rapidly leads to full-blown respiratory failure, followed by organ failure—patients were dead within eleven days, on average, after diagnosis. And as shocking as the death rate is, the Erasmus team said that the community’s isolation and inability to travel within the country （the group is denied movement by law） prevented widespread dissemination.
Half a year later, these villages remain isolated. Still, the Laotian government, abetted by the American one, is desperately trying to keep the story out of the news, because, along with the spread of disease, the gravest concerns are （1） the all-but-inevitable stigmatization of these poor people, which might easily lead to their mass murder, as we saw in Malaysia in ’40; and （2） another refugee crisis. Hong Kong’s borders are protected; so are Singapore’s, India’s, China’s, Japan’s, Korea’s, and Thailand’s. So, if there’s another large-scale population shift, it seems inevitable that the refugees will attempt to make their way across the Pacific. Those who aren’t shot on sight off the Philippine, Australian, New Zealand, Hawaiian, or American coasts will （the thinking goes） try to make their way to Oregon or Washington or Texas, and from those countries, over the border to the U.S.
Not surprisingly, the report kicked off a furor. Not about the team’s findings—those were incontrovertible—but about their suggestion, never actually stated but heavily implied, that this virus might be the one we had all been waiting and preparing for. Mingled with the fear was a certain amount of professional jealousy, along with resentment （if we’d had governments as dedicated to funding our research as the Netherlands’ is, then we’d have been the ones to discover this）， as well as a certain amount of excitement. Someone on one of the bulletin boards had compared speculative virology to being an understudy in a long-running Broadway show: You wait and wait for the chance to go on, and most of the time it never happens, but you have to stay alert regardless, because what if someday it’s your turn?
Now, because I know you’ll ask: The answer is that I don’t know. Will this be the one? I can’t say. My sense is it won’t be, that if Nipah-45 had the potential to be truly devastating we would have known about it far earlier. You would have known about it far earlier. It would have spread far beyond this network of villages. The fact that it hasn’t should be comforting. But, then again, a lot of things should be comforting these days.
I’ll keep you updated. You keep me updated, too. It seems remarkable that a deputy minister of the interior should increasingly have more information about global outbreaks than I do, but here we are. In the meantime: My love to you, always, and to Olivier as well. Stay out of trouble and keep away from bats.
Love, Me
My dearest Peter, January 6, 2048
We are all transfixed with horror by what’s happening over there. The labs more or less ceased operations today because everyone was watching the news, and when the bridge exploded, there was an audible gasp, not just in our lab but throughout the floor. That astonishing scene, of London Bridge collapsing, of those people and cars falling through the air—in the report we were watching, the newscaster cried out: no words, just a sound, and then was quiet, and all you could hear were the helicopters flying overhead. After, we sat around talking about who might be responsible, and one of my Ph.D.s said we should be thinking instead of who we hoped it wouldn’t be, because there were so many possible culprits. Do you think it was an attack on the refugee camp? Or something else?