The Viral Epiphany by Richard McSheehy Page B

been excused from attending because of the growing concern about the recent, and very deadly, outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever in the city. He stopped typing for a moment and looked up from his computer screen. For a few moments he simply gazed at the empty desks around him.   I love this, he thought, perfect isolation.   No people, no noise, no idle chitchat from the wannabes – just me by myself.   He took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled slowly and luxuriously; then he started typing again.
    He didn’t have a private office but the small enclosure he had erected around his desk kept prying eyes away from his computer screen.   This was the computer that had established his superiority in the office.   Now, under his direction, and, indeed, often with his active participation, teams of data gatherers accompanied the medical treatment teams that went into areas where sudden outbreaks of diseases such as malaria, dengue, or typhoid would occur.   He and his team collected as much data as possible about every aspect of the diseases and their spread and then, upon returning to Bangkok, they input the information into the analysis programs – the analysis programs that he alone had created.
      The results had been astonishingly successful in many ways. Tommy’s programs pinpointed hitherto unknown locations where malarial mosquitoes were breeding.   They had tracked down the source of tainted bootleg alcohol that killed over twenty people two months ago, and only last week his software had helped to locate the farmer whose chickens were the source of a bird flu outbreak near Chiang Mai.
    Tommy looked at the three-dimensional, color-coded plots on the screen and frowned. The results were obvious but also perplexing. Most of the victims lived in areas that didn’t historically have much of a mosquito problem.   Even more puzzling was that the victims didn’t all come from a single area, as he had assumed. In fact the first known victim of this new outbreak wasn’t even from Thailand; he had been a young man visiting from Japan.   The Disease Source Location program, a program he had written and which had never failed, was not converging to a solution.   What will I tell them? he thought .   How are we supposed to eradicate the mosquitoes if we don’t know where they are?
                He turned away from the computer screen and gazed out the window.   It was, as usual, partially covered with condensation due to the air-conditioning.   It was already hot outside, perhaps ninety-three degrees or more, but inside he felt comfortable in the slightly clammy, eighty-degree air.   An occasional drop of water dripped from the air-conditioning vent and fell noiselessly to the carpet.   He glanced up toward the vent and saw the black traces of mildew around the edges. He knew that spores were being blown from the vent into the room. It was part of life, that’s all.   It was how this particular life form propagated.
                Suddenly, a flash of inspiration illuminated his mind, and he sat up straight in his chair.   It’s not mosquitoes, he thought, it can’t be.   He began to quickly type commands into his computer. We were using the wrong program! This thing doesn’t have a single source vector location. That’s not how it propagates.
    He called up a more recent, experimental program he had written and began to access the database of information that had been gleaned by interviewing the families and friends of the victims of the current outbreak.   Within fifteen minutes he had his answer.
    I knew it! he said to himself, of course it’s not mosquitoes! It’s spreading by human-to-human contact. We were all wrong, this isn’t dengue at all - this is something new, different. This is something horrible!  
    He pushed himself back from his desk and recalled the interviews he had personally conducted when he went out with his team of investigators. He had spent most of