Global Rabies

Visiting a friend in hospital, you leave her room to get some coffee. Walking down the hall toward the vending area you spy a towel on the floor. A few feet beyond the towel stands one of those all-purpose carts -- the kind used by the janitorial staff. Reasonably assuming that the towel has just fallen from the cart, and being the fastidious citizen that you are, you bend over, pick it up, and toss it into the cart's wastecan just as two orderlies charge down the corridor toward you. They look at you, eyes wide, and say, voices trembling: "That fell from a tear in the bottom of the waste bag on the bio-hazard cart; it's contaminated with rabies virus!"

As you absently finger your watchband the staff physician tells you that rabies is virtually 100% fatal, that in all of medical history there has been only one person who survived untreated; a fifteen year old girl from Wisconsin. The physician says that infection may enter the body through the bloodstream and asks if you have any cuts or sores on the skin that came in contact with the towel. You look down at your index finger, at the little paper cut you got yesterday afternoon while cleaning your office. You silently pray to a personal God you do not really believe in.

So you are presented with your options and asked to make a decision. It is entirely possible that the part of the towel you touched was virus free, or that the virus particles in that area may have already been dead, in which case you will not contract rabies. It is also possible that the virus has already invaded your body. It may not be necessary, no one can tell you with absolute certainty, but you can choose to undergo a series of injections that will stimulate your immune system; enabling you to fight off the disease. The injections would be administered into the muscles of your abdomen and are known to be quite painful. Alternatively, you may elect to forgo treatment. After all, if you aren't infected you don't really need it and you will be fine. But, if you do have the virus in your body, you will almost certainly die.

As individuals most of us would choose to vastly reduce the risk of symptomatic rabies, albeit at the expense of some pain.

Where is Hari Seldon when we need him? As a species we often act contrary to the good of the whole, or of the individual. Humans have possibly contracted something far deadlier than individual cases of rabies, yet we debate endlessly. Is this weather, or is this climate? Are the changes we measure the result of axial precession, or the burning of hydrocarbons? Who the hell cares? We have touched the towel and we might get a fatal disease. The treatment will be painful; economic dislocation, clashing cultures, famine, disease, real suffering, and death. The alternative is possible, even probable, extinction.

We admire lemmings too well.