Tag Archives: virus

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Two Jonathans & a Chabon Are Fired Up About The Flame Alphabet

Ben Marcus reads from The Flame Alphabet tonight, January 26, at 7 p.m. at The Grotto at The Rendezvous (2322 2nd Avenue), in partnership with the University Bookstore.

That’s Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, who have all blurbed for Ben Marcus’s latest novel, The Flame Alphabet. Here’s Chabon’s outburst after reading the book:

Echoes of Ballard’s insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka’s terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes—I mean our world—out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of.  And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic.

If you subscribe to any magazines that still publish fiction, you’ve likely run across a Ben Marcus story. He keeps popping up in Harper’s, for one. Here he’s taken a horror movie plot–literally, the one I’m thinking of is set in Canada, there’s a virus in broadcast media–and detonated the connective tissue of reality into a strange new mess.

The novel opens with the narrator matter-of-factly explaining that he and his wife Claire are about to abandon his teenage daughter, Esther. As your first clue that a strange warping has occurred, what he describes at first sounds simply like a mouthy teenager, and you raise an eyebrow at the overreaction.  Although, there’s no denying it, teenagers are often a bitter pill for parents to swallow.

But very soon, you’re sucked in by both the stakes–no, the voices of children are actually sickening adults–and the taut, daredevil moves in each sentence. Here’s a bit from Chapter Five, still early on:

But in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes.

This isn’t satirically motivated–it’s Marcus’s way of reifying a gestalt gone gooey. The viral speech is just the beginning of his rabbit hole. Reconstructionist Jews, Sam  informs us, or “forest Jews,” build huts connected by underground wires that allow them to secretly listen in to rabbinical talks, in areas where synagogues aren’t available or perhaps wanted. In this world, even the fringe conspiracy theorists aren’t what they seem.

I wouldn’t say Marcus knits together these separate strands–virus fears, meaningless wasting disease, teenage anarchy, a marriage’s battered heart, spiritual questing, interrogation of language–so much as plays upon each catgut strand, creating weird, “gelatinous” chords of anxiety, peculiar in reach to our time, not least the disquieting interfacing of human being and information technology.

It is not, perhaps, the best book for anyone suffering with asthma to read, as Sam describes the speech virus’s progression in the throat and how hard it is to breathe. But there I was at midnight, uncomfortably close to a hallucinatory participation with this hallucinatory text, unable to put it down, fumbling for the albuterol.

Environment, Health, News

Salmon Virus Cover Up? Blame Canada!

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Contaminated salmon? (Photo: MvB)

“A decade before this fall’s salmon-virus scare, a Canadian government researcher said she found a similar virus in more than 100 wild fish from Alaska to Vancouver Island,” reports Craig Welch in the Seattle Times.

Four researchers authored the paper, which studied “chum, coho, pink and sockeye salmon from the west coast of Vancouver Island, Southeast Alaska, and the Bering Sea between August 2002 and April 2003,” says the Canadian Press in the Huffington Post.

Field researcher Molly Kibenge found indications of the virus in 117 fish, though all were asymptomatic. That wasn’t terribly surprising: In a paper published in Diseases of Aquatic Organisms in 2001, where her husband Fred Kibenge was lead author, they had already concluded that wild salmon could contract–but weren’t in terrible danger from–ISAv:

Within Norway, Scotland and the Canadian east coast (considered the normal geographic distribution), ISAV has been documented to cause disease outbreaks only in marine farmed Atlantic salmon. Wild fish with virus but no disease are common (Nylund et al. 1999, Devold et al. 2000), suggesting that asymptomatic or mild infection usually occurs among wild fish in those regions.

With no particular urgency to the findings, the paper was filed away. However, back in October, the news broke that infectious salmon anemia had come to the West Coast–or at least it had according to researchers who were bucking the official Canadian government word on the subject. So the paper, which clearly disputed the official government word as well, was suddenly relevant.

Molly Kibenge tried to get permission to submit the paper for publication in a journal–which would have opened the results up to peer review, for good or bad–but fellow author Simon Jones, of the Aquatic Animal Health Section of the Pacific Biological Station, refused. “[A]ll attempts to isolate the virus into cell culture failed,” he reminded Kibenge, who would have needed no reminding because it has been very difficult to isolate the virus into cell culture, even when working from dead salmon from the enormous Chilean outbreak that decimated the farmed salmon industry there.

Molly and Fred Kibenge’s 2001 paper suggests that very thing: “It is possible that ISAV strains of low virulence and non-pathogenic strains grow poorly or not at all in currently available fish cell lines,” they wrote.

When reports of more ISAv surfaced in early November, the government shot back that its tests, supported by an independent lab in Norway, showed no such thing. The problem? The Norwegian scientists actually disagreed:

“Our results are not conclusive, but do suggest … that an ISA virus is present in wild populations of O. nerka (Pacific sockeye),” Dr. Are Nylund, a professor of biology at the University of Bergen, wrote in an email exchange with The Seattle Times.

This tempest in a cell culture is ironic given that Molly Kibenge’s research, if accurate, would tend to reduce fears about the virus being “unleashed” in Pacific salmon–they already have it, it would seem, and are managing nicely. (That’s not to rule out the likelihood that the virus could mutate into a more virulent strain.)

What remains true is that farmed salmon Atlantic salmon are particularly susceptible to the virus, due in part to the cramped conditions of said farms, just as the close quarters of cities are breeding grounds for human viruses. The Canadian government’s alleged attempt to protect them from media exposure to the virus will do nothing to prevent an actual outbreak if wild fish are acting as a reservoir.

Meanwhile, Alexandra Morton, the biologist who found the latest suspect salmon, has had it with the governmental line. In a letter to Minister Ashfield she says:

Show us your Moncton test results because your lab is the only one that cannot find ISA virus. I would also suggest you stop obsessing over the quality of the River Inlet samples and go out and get your own samples. You have an entire department at your disposal.

Environment, Health, News, Science

Salmon Flu & You: Myths and Mysteries

Salmon at the Ballard Locks (Photo: MvB)

The lethal and highly infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAV) has, it’s been reported by the New York Times, “detected for the first time in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest.” The virulent form causes damage to blood vessels and blood cells–sick fish have pale gills and hemorrhage internally.

Of 48 juvenile sockeye salmon taken from British Columbia’s River Inlet, two tested positive for ISAV. Those findings are being checked now by third parties, but the original was performed by Dr. Fred Kibenge, from the OIE reference lab for ISAV. (Kibenge’s name is on most every ISAV study you will come across.)

Simon Fraser University’s Richard Routledge, a lead author on the study with biologist Alexandra Morton, is quoted as saying the virus might have “a devastating impact” on wild and farmed salmon. To date the virus has had its most lethal results in the hot zones created by salmon farms. Specifically, salmon farms raising Atlantic salmon.

A 2006 study found, “Coho salmon were resistant to all ISAV isolates”–Pacific salmon could carry the virus, but would not display symptoms. They were a disease reservoir. (This despite a 2001 study that found Chilean farmed Coho were killed by ISAV.) That’s why this finding, in a mysteriously declining population of Pacific salmon, is so disturbing.

Nor is the activist Morton disinterested, as her blog makes clear:

…Canada has failed to maintain a line of defense against ISAV. There is no place on the Fish Health Certificate that must be signed by foreign hatcheries to report ISAV. Even when the European strain of the virus began spreading in Chile, Canada did not close the border to eggs, government did not even make it a reportable disease if it occurred on a fish farm, even though it is an internationally reportable disease.

Classified as an Orthomyxoviridae virus, ISAV’s “behavior” is compared analogically to influenza, while researchers attempt to find out how, specifically, the virus works: “Through functional studies of the coded proteins it has been established that RNA segments 5 and 6 code for a fusion protein and hemagglutinin, respectively, while two polypeptides coded by segments 7 and 8 inhibit interferon induction.”Ah.

It’s definitely a fish flu, and not something you can pick from a can of salmon mousse (unless you are an Atlantic salmon), but of course influenza-type viruses tend to mutate. When scientists examined the 2007 strain of ISAV that decimated Chilean salmon farms, they discovered that the strain had arrived in Chile about 1996. The 2007 incidence of ISAV “caused the overall production of salmon to plummet 50% and 15,000 employees to lose their jobs.”

(ISAV is not the only disease stalking salmon, of course: “Severe infection by the myxozoan parasite Ceratomyxa shasta has, in large part, been responsible for the declining numbers of juvenile K[lamath] R[iver] fall Chinook and coho salmon and subsequent impacts on later adult returns.“)

U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mark Begich (D-AK) are taking no chances on it being ISAV. The three are calling for an investigation of the potential spread of the virus: Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) Appropriations bill (H.R. 2112), “calls on the National Aquatic Animal Health Task Force to evaluate the risk the virus could have on salmon off West Coast waters and Alaskan waters, and to develop a plan to address this emerging threat,” says a release from Cantwell’s office.