h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

heinlein - clarke - asimov - gaiman - pratchett - adams - feist... i've got 'em all on my bookshelf! i especially like clarke (even though all of my friends think him dry as dust) and feist (although most of the books i've read came off my best friend's bookshelf).

have you read adams' 'last chance to see'? incredible - and bob-awfully funny.

Shazow, You have good taste, man. ish. Strangely enough I just bought Last chance to see. I had never read it, less even seen it. So a couple weeks ago I became stranded in Portland, home of Powell's, the largest indy bookstore on earth. As can be expected, they had a couple copies, so I grabbed one. Haven't started it yet; it's at the end of an unsettlingly long line of books... But with the amount of sleep I've been getting lately, I should be to it in no time at all.

I'd love to talk more, but it's 4 AM and I haven't eaten since I last slept (a long time) so I need to go hit Dennys. Talk to ya later, Doc.

NC*

"Three ways to keep a great smile: Brush, see a dentist regularly, and mind your own F***ing business!"
Random quote guild

Welcome, welcome. Haven't seen you around in, well, 4 days. How's things?

hello, nc!

i've been in pc wilderness for the past four days, just came back in time to see my mailboxes explode. okay... so i was on vacation, and the hotel i was staying in didn't have internet connection. drove me utterly bonkers.

getting adams' book is something of a challenge here - which is why the only books i got here were 'last chance' and 'salmon'. the rest all came from various places around the globe! ('liff' i got from perth)

i wouldn't *mind* having a pile of unread books, seeing as i tend to finish my books faster than i can stock up. good for the mind, bad for the pockets.

Indeed. ...just thought I'd say that. Anyway, I need your help. You seem up to date with lots of the little nasties that prowl around looking for people to attack, so I need the name of a good one. It's for a book I just got the idea for. Something currently incurable, inoperable, and would really screw up the last couple months of your life. In fact, something that would make a weak person kill themself if they got it, or a rich person freeze themself if they got it. The latter being the start of the book, the rest of which is the person's misadventures as they cope with being awoken several hundred years later to a spiraling number of conspiracies and problems, like did he leave his oven on? So anyway, if you got the name and a short description of a virus or otherwise that you particularly dread, I'd love to hear about it!

"Sharing is caring; F*CK THE RIAA!!"
Random quote guild

ha ha! my favourite subject!



you want something incurable, inoperable and would screw up somebody's life? oooh.... where microbes are concerned, 'currently incurable' is a finnicky thing. they're curable one day, incurable the next... all thanks to the abuse of antibiotics! the word, my friend, is 'multiple drug resistance' - more and more microbes are gaining resistance to drugs each day, which of course makes life hell for doctors and microbiologists. if you're interested about this phenomenon, i could go into great detail...

okay, incurable bugs. er, ok, what about those that are currently curable, but could at any time gain resistance to the drugs currently used to kill them off, and subsequently wreak havoc on the populace:

1. yersinia pestis - the plague bacillus! it just doesn't get any more cruel. it's transmitted by a rodent flea - the rodents get the disease, and the fleas, half-crazed from hunger (the bacteria makes it impossible for them to derive nourishment from the blood they suck), turn to humans for blood, thus giving them the bacillus. first signs are the purpuric lesions on the skin. the bacteria spreads to almost every part of the body, causing the lymph nodes to swell up into these huge, grotesque blobs of dead flesh called 'buboes'. also causes your lungs to bleed, and the tissues, to die, and ah.... you can also bleed from all over. of course you also get the generic nausea and vomitting (blood), constipation and diarrhoea... as well as (get ready) gangrene of the digits and penis. how much nastier do you want?

2. streptococcus pyogenes - ever heard of flesh-eating bacteria? the disease isn't what i'd call 'completely curable' because a significant number of people still die from it because the bacteria works SO FAST that it spreads faster than doctors can remove dead tissue. i wrote an edited article on it sometime back: A907481. read it and despair.

3. clostridium perfringens - the bacteria that causes gas gangrene! (note: there are two types of gangrene - the sort that's caused by extreme cold, and the sort that's caused by bacteria. guess which one is worse) again, not a 'completely curable' disease - and if you don't amputate, it can get really bad. trust me, i know - call it more or less 'personal experience' (no it didn't happen to me, but to a member of my family) the bacteria enters the body through a puncture in the flesh. because the bacteria is anaerobic (it doesn't breathe air - in fact, air would kill it), the deep tissues of the flesh is a really good place for it to grow. it spreads, causing tissue and muscle destruction (the flesh turns black), and at the same time, the products from the breakdown of tissue slowly poisons the body. plus it really, really REEKS.

4. e. coli 0157:h7 - this bug has been receiving a great deal of bad press! especially in the states when all those kids who ate raw/improperly-cooked burgers came down with haemolytic uremic syndrome. again, not a 'completely curable' disease, especially if not caught in time. death is from renal failure, but it does plenty of other damage: severe bloody diarrhoea (due to bleeding in the gut), abdominal cramps... and it can punch holes through your gut. it's severely evil - which is tragic, because the normal e. coli is a friendly little bacteria that lives in your intestines.


okay, enough about bacteria... what about viruses?

1. nipah virus - i don't think all that many people have heard of this, on account of it being new (it was discovered in malaysia in 1999). causes inflammation of the brain and practically reduces your brain to sponge. the primary host is thought to be bats, but the disease was spread through infective droplets from pig to farmer. they're currently using ribavirin to cure it, but there's only so much the drug can do (plus, they never had the time to perform clinical trials).

or you want utterly incurable? what about a prion disease? namely creutzfeld-jacob disease! (aka the human form of mad cow disease) i can guarantee that this is not curable at present time! mankind has had plenty of time to learn about bacteria, viruses, protozoan parasites.... but infective proteins?!? (not to mention they're practically indestructable - the high-heat and chemical sterilisation techniques used in the lab to disinfect equipments does nothing to them) and progressive degeneration of the brain is plenty cruel.... especially at the end, when you can't even swallow.


i'll go check my textbook and see if there are any nastier bugs that i've forgotten, or those that cause incurable diseases. hang on.....

hey, i just thought of something. do you want a disease that's not necessarily fatal, but gruesomely disfiguring? cos i have a really good one in mind: aspergillosis! it's a fungal infection (bob almighty i hate those. at least bacteria are decent) spread by pigeon poop containing the fungus aspergillus. it primarily attacks the lungs but,it can also spread through your skin tissue. when you take sections of the tissue and examine them under a microscope, you see tendrils (hyphae) snaking through 'em. and bob almighty, they look absolutely freaky on the skin. (think grotesque lumps of skin...) if looking at yourself in the mirror when your face is infected doesn't drive you mad or make you want to kill yourself, i don't know what will. er... have a look:

http://www.aspergillus.man.ac.uk/indexhome.htm?languages/lay_cornernew.htm~main

(couldn't find any good photos of the facial horrors, but you can imagine...)

(other icky things: you might want leprosy - mycobacterium leprae - or maybe the ebola or lassa virus. of course, i didn't mention the two viruses earlier because so many people have written about them that most people are sick of the whole thing already)


oh, and here's a really good website:

http://www.emedicine.com

Yowza! Started not feeling well just reading about that stuff. Anyway, the process continues, and you have been more helpful than I can describe. Thankyou.

So what is your connection to these little critters? Study? Collection? Eradication? ...Creation? Just an interest?

Sounds fascinating, even through deep layers of hatred for biology, cultivated from years of physics and chemistry and things that seem to follow a pattern and are much less likely to destroy my life. Or at the very least make me uglier than the present format.

Again, thanks, and happy holiday of your choice!

hi blunder,

i'm purely a research scientist (i'm a microbiologist) - unbiased and solely interested in microbes as microbes. of course, i'm also terribly fond of the little critters, which is why i have my own little campaign to promote respect for microbes here at hootoo (A1001854)

let me know which bug you're using for your story. it'll be neat seeing it from a non-microbiologist point of view!



far.

Hey.
How's things?
Good job on hitting (no pun intended) the front page.
Keep it up.
GTG L8r

(I really do have to go. Sorry to be so short.)
NC

hey blunder! good to see you around dunno if you've gotten 'round to checking your box, but sken's been posting messages in all mi42 threads for agents to call in - or risk being listed as mia.

hey blunder! good to see you around! dunno if you've gotten 'round to checking your box, but sken's been posting messages in all mi42 threads telling all agents to call in - or risk being listed as mia.