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Author | Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Techno-thriller |
Publisher | Tor Books |
Publication date | 1996 |
Media type | Print (paperback) |
Pages | 512 |
ISBN | 0-7653-5996-0 |
OCLC | 317723824 |
Followed by | Riptide |
Mount Dragon is a 1996 techno-thriller novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The action primarily follows Guy Carson and Susana Cabeza de Vaca, two researchers employed by the corporation GeneDyne and stationed at the Mount Dragon facility in New Mexico. In attempting to engineer a therapeutic hormone to prevent all forms of influenza, GeneDyne has accidentally created a frighteningly virulent disease. Meanwhile, Carson and Cabeza de Vaca face a much more immediate threat at the Mount Dragon facility—from their own colleagues.
Dr. Guy Carson is a young scientist and cowboy-at-heart, raised on a southwestern ranch and bored with city life. That is, until the prestigious genetic engineering corporation GeneDyne offers Carson a six-month position as a lab researcher at its Mount Dragon Remote Desert Testing Facility in Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. Carson accepts and soon finds that the Mount Dragon laboratory is testing far more promising and dangerous things than Carson ever expected. Scientists at the facility spend months isolated from the outside world, essentially locked in the guarded facility within a Level 5 containment lab, as they research a vaccine for the influenza virus. With the help of his feisty lab assistant, Susanna Cabeza de Vaca, Carson begins to unlock the mysteries of the spontaneously mutating influenza virus, dubbed “X-FLU”.
Over time, Carson and DeVaca discover that their predecessor Dr. Franklin Burt, was literally driven mad by his time at Mount Dragon and was institutionalized. Burt’s death is not the only one caused by the facility; an emergency quarantine prompted by the contamination of the Level 5 lab by a chimp infected with the deadly X-FLU results in the death of researcher Rosalind Brandon-Smith. Soon, more human harm follows as Carson’s friend and messmate Dr. Andrew Vanderwagon spontaneously punctures his own eye with a fork and attempts to commit suicide and kill others. Through researching Burt’s descent to madness, Carson and DeVaca realize that what occurred with Vanderwagon closely resembled the behavior of Burt toward the end. In fact, everyone at the facility except for Carson and DeVaca begin to display abnormal and erratic behavior that Carson at first presumes is the result of tight quarters or contamination by X-FLU.
However, Carson has an epiphany after conducting further tests on influenza and discovers that what caused the virus to mutate is Burt’s filtering system — a system that was used to filter the artificial blood product PurBlood that GeneDyne is releasing in hospitals across the nation in mere days. Burt’s journal confirms that PurBlood is in fact contaminated; Burt’s filtering system caused the contamination by mutating the cells in the artificial blood.
Carson and DeVaca are the only workers at the Mount Dragon facility who did not undergo a PurBlood transfusion for beta testing, and thus are the only ones not driven to insanity by the contamination. They set off an explosion to destroy the facility and flee from its homicidal and suicidal inhabitants. Attempting to alert officials before PurBlood can be introduced across the nation, resulting in an epidemic, Carson and DeVaca set off on horseback across the arid New Mexico desert, hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization. They are chased by the security director, an eccentric Englishman named Nye whose PurBlood-induced madness has led him to believe that there is a treasure buried in the desert and that Carson and DeVaca are trying to steal it from him. After days of thirst and starvation, Carson and DeVaca find water—and the remains of the worthless “treasure” of Spanish explorer Mondragón—before engaging in a fight-to-the-death battle with Nye. Carson and DeVaca are injured, but survive, and make it to a nearby cattle ranch in time to spread the word about the dangers of PurBlood.
Aside from the action-ridden plot of Carson and DeVaca, the novel highlights political and scientific battle between the CEO of GeneDyne, Brent Scopes, and his former best friend, Charles Levine, over the ethics of genetic modification. Scopes argues that genetic modification, such as that involved in the creation of PurBlood, will one day lead to a healthier human race. Levine counters that the extent of the dangers of genetically modified products is unknown, and that humans should proceed with caution in genetically altering or engineering products that could change the biological make-up of humanity. In the end, Scopes and Levine are exposed to the mutated influenza virus X-FLU and resolve their differences before dying.
Mime, the "Thalidomide baby" hacker who assists Professor Levine, later appears in Preston and Child's Aloysius Pendergast series, offering similar assistance to Special Agent Pendergast. GeneDyne devices are also used in early Pendergast novels.
Influenza A virus (IAV) is a pathogen that causes the flu in birds and some mammals, including humans. It is an RNA virus whose subtypes have been isolated from wild birds. Occasionally, it is transmitted from wild to domestic birds, and this may cause severe disease, outbreaks, or human influenza pandemics.
Avian influenza, also known as avian flu, is a bird flu caused by the influenza A virus, which can infect people. It is similar to other types of animal flu in that it is caused by a virus strain that has adapted to a specific host. The type with the greatest risk is highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).
Antigenic drift is a kind of genetic variation in viruses, arising from the accumulation of mutations in the virus genes that code for virus-surface proteins that host antibodies recognize. This results in a new strain of virus particles that is not effectively inhibited by the antibodies that prevented infection by previous strains. This makes it easier for the changed virus to spread throughout a partially immune population. Antigenic drift occurs in both influenza A and influenza B viruses.
Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 (A/H5N1) is a subtype of the influenza A virus which can cause illness in humans and many other species. A bird-adapted strain of H5N1, called HPAI A(H5N1) for highly pathogenic avian influenza virus of type A of subtype H5N1, is the highly pathogenic causative agent of H5N1 flu, commonly known as avian influenza. It is enzootic in many bird populations, especially in Southeast Asia. One strain of HPAI A(H5N1) is spreading globally after first appearing in Asia. It is epizootic and panzootic, killing tens of millions of birds and spurring the culling of hundreds of millions of others to stem its spread. Many references to "bird flu" and H5N1 in the popular media refer to this strain.
Swine influenza is an infection caused by any of several types of swine influenza viruses. Swine influenza virus (SIV) or swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) refers to any strain of the influenza family of viruses that is endemic in pigs. As of 2009, identified SIV strains include influenza C and the subtypes of influenza A known as H1N1, H1N2, H2N1, H3N1, H3N2, and H2N3.
In virology, influenza A virus subtype H1N1 (A/H1N1) is a subtype of influenza A virus. Major outbreaks of H1N1 strains in humans include the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the 1977 Russian flu pandemic and the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It is an orthomyxovirus that contains the glycoproteins hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), antigens whose subtypes are used to classify the strains of the virus as H1N1, H1N2 etc. Hemagglutinin causes red blood cells to clump together and binds the virus to the infected cell. Neuraminidase is a type of glycoside hydrolase enzyme which helps to move the virus particles through the infected cell and assist in budding from the host cells.
Influenza A virus subtype H2N2 (A/H2N2) is a subtype of Influenza A virus. H2N2 has mutated into various strains including the "Asian flu" strain, H3N2, and various strains found in birds. It is also suspected of causing a human pandemic in 1889. The geographic spreading of the 1889 Russian flu has been studied and published.
Influenza A virus subtype H3N2 (A/H3N2) is a subtype of viruses that causes influenza (flu). H3N2 viruses can infect birds and mammals. In birds, humans, and pigs, the virus has mutated into many strains. In years in which H3N2 is the predominant strain, there are more hospitalizations.
The global spread of H5N1 influenza in birds is considered a significant pandemic threat. While other H5N1 influenza strains are known, they are significantly different on a genetic level from a recent, highly pathogenic, emergent strain of H5N1, which was able to achieve hitherto unprecedented global spread in 2008. The H5N1 strain is a fast-mutating, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI) found in multiple bird species. It is both epizootic and panzootic. Unless otherwise indicated, "H5N1" in this timeline refers to the recent highly pathogenic strain of H5N1.
Transmission and infection of H5N1 from infected avian sources to humans has been a concern since the first documented case of human infection in 1997, due to the global spread of H5N1 that constitutes a pandemic threat.
Influenza B virus is the only species in the genus Betainfluenzavirus in the virus family Orthomyxoviridae.
Spanish flu research concerns studies regarding the causes and characteristics of the Spanish flu, a variety of influenza that in 1918 was responsible for the worst influenza pandemic in modern history. Many theories about the origins and progress of the Spanish flu persisted in the literature, but it was not until 2005, when various samples of lung tissue were recovered from American World War I soldiers and from an Inupiat woman buried in permafrost in a mass grave in Brevig Mission, Alaska, that significant genetic research was made possible.
Fujian flu refers to flu caused by either a Fujian human flu strain of the H3N2 subtype of the Influenza A virus or a Fujian bird flu strain of the H5N1 subtype of the Influenza A virus. These strains are named after Fujian, a coastal province in Southeast China.
Human mortality from H5N1 or the human fatality ratio from H5N1 or the case-fatality rate of H5N1 is the ratio of the number of confirmed human deaths resulting from confirmed cases of transmission and infection of H5N1 to the number of those confirmed cases. For example, if there are 100 confirmed cases of humans infected with H5N1 and 10 die, then there is a 10% human fatality ratio. H5N1 flu is a concern due to the global spread of H5N1 that constitutes a pandemic threat. The majority of H5N1 flu cases have been reported in southeast and east Asia. The case-fatality rate is central to pandemic planning. Estimates of case-fatality (CF) rates for past influenza pandemics have ranged from to 2-3% for the 1918 pandemic to about 0.6% for the 1957 pandemic to 0.2% for the 1968 pandemic. As of 2008, the official World Health Organization estimate for the case-fatality rate for the outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza was approximately 60%. Public health officials in Ontario, Canada argue that the true case-fatality rate could be lower, pointing to studies suggesting it could be 14-33%, and warned that it was unlikely to be as low as the 0.1–0.4% rate that was built into many pandemic plans.
Jeffery K. Taubenberger is an American virologist. With Ann Reid, he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus which caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. He is Chief of the Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section, Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health. Taubenberger's laboratory studies a number of viruses, including influenza A viruses (IAVs), which are the pathogens that cause yearly flu epidemics and have caused periodic pandemics, such as the 1968 outbreak that killed an estimated one million people. His research aims to inform public health strategies on several important aspects of flu: seasonal flu; avian flu, which circulates among birds and has infected humans in the past; swine flu, which circulates among pigs and has infected humans in the past; and pandemic flu, which can arise from numerous sources and spread quickly because humans have little to no immunity to it.
Siti Fadilah Supari, is a cardiology research specialist, a former health minister of Indonesia. She gained global notoriety in 2007 when she took on the World Health Organization's practice of sharing avian influenza virus samples.
Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses. Symptoms range from mild to severe and often include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. These symptoms begin from one to four days after exposure to the virus and last for about 2–8 days. Diarrhea and vomiting can occur, particularly in children. Influenza may progress to pneumonia, which can be caused by the virus or by a subsequent bacterial infection. Other complications of infection include acute respiratory distress syndrome, meningitis, encephalitis, and worsening of pre-existing health problems such as asthma and cardiovascular disease.
The 2009 swine flu pandemic, caused by the H1N1/swine flu/influenza virus and declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) from June 2009 to August 2010, is the third recent flu pandemic involving the H1N1 virus. The first two cases were discovered independently in the United States in April 2009. The virus appeared to be a new strain of H1N1 that resulted from a previous triple reassortment of bird, swine, and human flu viruses which further combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus, leading to the term "swine flu".
The pandemic H1N1/09 virus is a swine origin influenza A virus subtype H1N1 strain that was responsible for the 2009 swine flu pandemic. This strain is often called swine flu by the public media. For other names, see the Nomenclature section below.
A H5N1 vaccine is an influenza vaccine intended to provide immunization to influenza A virus subtype H5N1.