The prologue was titled "Prologue: AVein Is A River". The book seems to be written from Carl Zimmerman's point of view, which makes his writing a little more personal and interesting. I think I am going to write my blog posts in a series of instalments for each chapter, because many different types of parasites are covered in one chapter. They will probably be a lot shorter than this post, but there was just a lot I wished to cover in this post. The prologue will probably have a few more parts to it. After reading the first part, I have to say, I am enjoying the tone of the book and the prologue did its job - it made me want to keep reading. Again, sorry for the long post, but if your a fan of long posts... your welcome! Enjoy.
The prologue starts out in a hospital in Tambura, Sudan with a boy named Justin. Zimmerman, doctor Mickey Richer (who actually had a hospital in the town), and nurse John Carcello traveled there from the US to investigate, so to speak, the parasite outbreaks of the area. Justin was twelve years old at the time. His shoulders and belly were curved like a bowl, his neck was severely swollen, his eyes were bulged out, and his nose was clogged shut. Justin was infected by trypanosomes, the parasites that cause sleeping sickness. Trypsanomes are single-celled organisms and more closely related to humans than bacteria. Justin got them from being bitten by a tsetse fly and the parasite began to feed on the oxygen and glucose from his blood. They avoid the immune system, invade organs, and eventually reach the brain. Richer treated the people with the early stages of sleeping sickness with a series of pentamidine injections for 10 days in the buttocks. But for serious cases like Justin's, where the parasite had already slipped up to the brain, they were injected with melarsoprol, which is made of 20% arsenic and can melt ordinary IV tubes (so extremely tough tubes were needed). If the melarsoprol were to get on the skin, the skin would swell and at worst, if it got on a limb, the limb would have to be amputated. Richer put Justin on steroids and hoped he would survive the night, which he did and by the next day his swelling had gone down extraordinarily.
Zimmerman went into the description of what people think of when they hear the word
parasites. When he tells people around his home in New York that he studies parasites, people often say "You mean tapeworms?" or "You mean my ex-wives?" The word
parasites technically means "anything that lives on or in another organism at the expense of the organism" but scientists tend to use the word for everything that fits that description, except bacteria and viruses.
There was a little history lesson on the past of sleeping sickness in the prologue as well. Sleeping sickness threatens anyone in range of the tsetse fly, which is around Africa and south Sahara. There is a version of sleeping sickness that affects cattle, which has caused 4.5 million square miles of land in Africa to become off limits to cattle ranchers and usually 3 million cattle die each year of the disease. When Europeans colonized Africa and forced people to stay there and work in the fly infested areas, many epidemics occurred. In 1906, Winston Churchill reported that one sleeping sickness epidemic reduced Uganda's population of 6.5 million to 2.5 million. By WWII, scientists found that the drug used to treat syphilis, a sort of "crude poison", could also kill trypanosomes. Scientists went through the fly infested areas and healed the ill. They talked about eliminating sleeping sickness around the 1950's and 1960's, but war, poor economy, and horrible governments crushed that dream. A civil war in Sudan drove away Belgian and British doctors and shut down hospitals. This allowed for outbreaks of sleeping sickness to occur again. In a survey ran by Richer in 1997 she found that around 20% of the 12,000 Sudan population carried sleeping sickness.
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