..................By the time the first victim has succumbed to this unknown, unsuspected new illness, they will have spread it by coughs and sneezes to family, friends, and all those gathered anxiously around them.
Thanks to our crowded, hyper-connected world, this doomsday virus will already have begun crossing the globe by air, rail, road and sea before even the best brains in medicine have begun to chisel at its genetic secrets. Before it even has a name, it will have started to cut its lethal swathe through the world’s population.
The high security unit
If this new virus follows the pattern of the pandemic of 1918-1919, it will cruelly reap mass harvests of young and fit people.
They die because of something called a ‘cytokine storm’ — a vast overreaction of their strong and efficient immune systems that is prompted by the virus.
This uncontrolled response burns them with a fever and wracks their bodies with nausea and massive fatigue. The hyper-activated immune system actually kills the person, rather than killing the super-virus.
Professor Oxford bases his prediction on historical patterns.
The past century has certainly provided us with many disturbing precedents. For example, the 2003 global outbreak of Sars, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed nearly 1,000 people, was transmitted to humans from Asian civet cats in China.
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