The Laptev Virus

He looked outside again and saw that the rain was finally letting up. The clouds would probably blow away within the hour and the city would become a tropical swampland, the air thick with humidity and mosquitoes.

CHAPTER 22

“You’re up early,” said John sleepily. “5:56. Have you been up long?”

Sarah looked up from her laptop and smiled at her husband. She loved the way he looked in the morning with his ruffled hair, so boyish. “I’ve been thinking about your mice that were acting braver than they should—are you still having that problem?”

John walked over and started the coffee machine. “Actually, yes,” he said, drawing the word out as he fought with a yawn. He shook his head, as if to clear it. “We have narrowed it down to one small group that is not acting normal. We’ve got them isolated and we’re not including them in the study for now until we figure out why they are so different from the rest.”

“Do you think it might be related to what Molly told us about bringing her mouse back for a visit? Since we found out that our mice have Toxoplasmosis, I’ve been wondering if perhaps your mice might be contaminated like mine?”

John pressed his lips together. “Hmm, well, I guess it’s a possibility. It crossed my mind briefly when you first told me about it, but I asked Trevor and he said that none of my mice came from C12.”

Sarah twirled her ponytail thoughtfully and nodded. Her gaze seemed miles away. “If you want, you can send some of the little guys down to my lab and we’ll draw some blood samples and run a few tests.”

John held the coffee pot aloft as he stopped and reflected on Sarah’s words. “Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt. What made you think of this?”

“It’s something I was reading about Toxoplasmosis,” she said, pointing to her glowing laptop screen. “In our meeting yesterday Miquela asked if humans can get Toxoplasmosis, so I started reading about it some more. And studies do show that Toxoplasmosis infections can affect behavior in rodents.”

John grabbed a box of cereal from the pantry and reached for a bowl. “You know, now that you mention it, I actually have heard of those studies, but I didn’t make the connection. Okay, I’ll have Trevor take you some mice this morning.”

“Are they infected with Toxo?” asked John as he picked up his wife’s call that afternoon.

“Yes. Every last one of the mice in your group that’s acting funny—not afraid of the stimuli that should frighten them—they all have it. ”

John sighed heavily. “Sheeze. I was afraid you’d say that. I did some more reading on the subject this morning, and it all fits. How about the others—the ones that are acting normal?” he asked.

“All clean. Only the ones that are acting strange have the infection.”

John was silent for a moment and Sarah could picture him biting his lower lip as he thought. “Well, at least that makes it easy. We’ll get rid of those mice and make sure we start over with a clean batch. How do you think they caught the infection? Could it have been from when Molly worked for our side of the vivarium a few weeks ago?”

“No, I don’t think it was Molly herself who carried the Toxo to your mice, but it could be that Opus, Molly’s mouse, is like the Typhoid Mary of the late 1800s, early 1900s—do you remember studying about her?”

“Um, the name rings a bell, but I can’t say I recall the details. Just that she got people sick or something like that?”

“You’re pretty good!” said Sarah, chuckling as she spoke. “Typhoid Mary was a cook who did not wash her hands after going to the bathroom.”

“Disgusting.”

“Yeah, well from the number of signs in restrooms in restaurants nowadays it’s something we are still struggling to teach people who prepare our food.”

“Ugh, I hadn’t thought of it that way. So Typhoid Mary got people sick?”

“Yeah, many of the people who ate her food got sick, but she, herself, didn’t show any signs of infection. So she inadvertently provided the scientific community with the first example ever documented of a carrier with no symptoms—an asymptomatic carrier, as we now call them. But remember, at this time we still hadn’t established the clear connection between bacteria and infections. And there were no antibiotics yet. Disease control was still partly based on superstition.”

“Bad airs, evils spirits…”

“You got it! My recollection is that Mary went from house to house, in different cities, always working for families as their cook, of all things! And soon after she came to their kitchens, members of the family would get sick with typhoid. Several people even died from the disease. It took the authorities a few years to finally figure out that she was the link between all of the cases, because of course, she kept moving and didn’t exactly leave forwarding addresses.”

“Not surprising.”

“Yeah, and to make matters worse, I think she even refused to cooperate with the doctors when they finally showed her the evidence because she didn’t really believe them.”

“You’re kidding!” said John.