MY STORY - BY DOCTOR X "THE QUARANTINE PROJECT"

"The following is a story that needs to be told before I'm pilloried in the press as a madman, or worse, a murderer. Read my journey to enlightenment, and then draw your own conclusions."
--I remain humbly Dr. X

TRAVEL

--November 30th, 2002

I have achieved a kind of numbness. For months I have been working, exhausted, forcing myself to ignore the horror all around me. Constantly shocked by poverty, hunger, disease. But this morning I awoke beneath my gauzy mosquito net with a sense of gentle clarity, as if a switch in my brain was flipped. I am here to work, to heal, to dispense medicine and to study infection patterns. I do not need to have an emotional life. I can turn off that human side, and view the starving and dying purely as vectors and as data.

--December 10th, 2002

I've been haunted by a conversation that took place yesterday. Apparently the village that I'm working in was visited several year ago by Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. This was at the height of the first Ebola outbreak in 1992. He brought 40 followers with him. They posed as medical volunteers here but in fact they were attempting to acquire samples of the virus to use as a biologic weapon. Having worked here and witnessed the horrific effects of the virus on a human body, I am chilled by the idea of an ideology-fueled weaponization. Human beings turned to melting bags of blood... organs necrotized into bile... pores and orifices gaping with gore. I have had an 8 year old boy decompose into screaming strips of fatty tissue. Who would want to be responsible for such a disease? Who would want to unleash that kind of biological violence out of free will? Is it not enough that we have so imbalanced nature, that we have brought poor populations to such a desperate state? It has kept me up all night, seeing visions of Asahara, laughing above a sea of boiling blood, the blood of 10,000 dying children.

--July 18th, 2003

Last night I drove from Port-au-Prince and arrived in Cazole, a rural town with surprisingly clean, maintained facilities. Clean water is available and there is a more than adequate clinic. This morning I walked for an hour and a half into the mountains. The population here is horrifically impoverished. I spent ten hours collecting sputum samples. Tuberculosis is epidemic among these villages. Filth and blood are the elemental building materials. Even the youngest and healthiest here have a hallowed socket that makes me feel as though I am surrounded by the undead.

CDC

--October 17th, 2006

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