Greetings from your Friendly Neighbourhood Plague
Hello. My name’s Yersinia Pestis and I’ll be your disease for the next few days. You know why they call me that? Well have yersinia doctor recently – because you really should!
Just a little plague humour for you there to take the edge off. I mean if you haven’t got your sense of humour what have you got? I figured that since we’re going to be working very closely together – at least for a while - I’d start by telling you a little bit about myself while you’re still able to concentrate.
I’m a simple, down-to-earth rod-shaped bacterium who likes spreading virulently, killing millions, and destabilising whole civilisations. I’d like to take this opportunity to say how great it is to be inside such a large organism for a change. I’ve been cooped up in that bastard flea for ages, stuck behind a plug of slime in its gut (which is exactly as much fun as it sounds) until it decided to take a bite out of you. Then because it was already full of me it – well, just look at the pavement outside a nightclub in the early hours of a Saturday morning and you’ll get the idea. I reckon that flea must have vomited somewhere between ten to twenty thousand of me into your bloodstream. That’s fleas for you. All class.
Uh, nope, looks like I’m here for good now. Well, not good, obviously. Not unless you’ve got some antibiotics handy. You haven’t? Shame.
And your immune system? I’m sorry but that’s just not going to happen this time. You know how normally when you get an infection you’ve got those immune cells, the macrophages, the ones that envelope and eat foreign organisms like me? Well, no – I’ve got me a type 3 secretion system to take care of them. And you know those other ones that burst open to alert the other immune cells and to stop me from having somewhere to spread, and that’s why you get all inflamed and puffy? I’ve got a hack for that too – a special protein I like to call Yop. All my little yoppies are going to disable your immune cells’ auto-destruct sequences, and they’re going to do precisely nothing except carry me straight to the lymph nodes in your throat, your armpits and your groin.
Where we are going to par-tay.
By the time your immune system has got it together those nodes are going to be up like fuckin' zeppelins. I’ll be in your spleen and liver and you’ll feel like you’ve got the worst case of flu in the world, and if I’m able to get into your bloodstream you can add septicemia, abdominal cramps, vomiting blood, and gangrene in your extremities. The presence of so much of me will cause your system to go batshit crazy, triggering septic shock where your veins and arteries haemorrhage, your blood pressure drops through the floor and your organs die quicker than the characters in A Game of Thrones.
But hey, it’s not all about me. I’m a social animal, really; I just love getting out and meeting new people. I can’t wait to get into your lungs, because then I can go full-on pneumonic and spray myself all over your loved ones every time you cough. Hundred percent fatality rate, baby, that’s what I’m talking about.
In the absence of antibiotics I suppose you could always try some of the old-fashioned remedies like eating crushed emeralds, drinking mercury, or covering yourself in human excrement. If you’re really desperate you could even try praying. Hahahahahaaa!
No, seriously.
