Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome (2 page)

So that’s what happened here. The Haden’s virus is transmissible by air, which makes it easy to catch. By the time the International Epidemiological Conference winter meeting had adjourned, roughly eighty percent of the thousand or so attendees had been infected. They had been in close contact and breathing in each other’s air the entire three days. And then when they dispersed they traveled back to several hundred points of origin on six separate continents, traveling in airplanes packed with other people. From a virus’ point of view, you couldn’t have asked for a more optimal transmission pattern.

Now, that’s optimal for the virus. It’s not optimal for us. When it came to the Haden’s virus, by the time we knew what we were dealing with, we also knew that it had potentially already spread to millions and possibly billions of people. What we didn’t know was how serious this new virus would be. We had half of New York throwing up in ER rooms, but we didn’t know how long it would take for the virus to resolve itself, and for the body’s own systems to beat it.

We did know we didn’t have a vaccine. The Haden’s virus initially presented like an influenza virus, but when we started looking at it we realized we really were looking at something new, so the sort of antivirals we use for flu—the neuraminidase and M2 inhibitors—weren’t necessarily going to have the same effect on Haden’s.

So no matter what, we were in for a rough time.

Monique Davis:

The first phase of Haden’s looked like flu and acted like flu, but it was the worst flu we’d seen. Lots of vomiting. Lots of respiratory congestion. Fevers as people’s immune responses kicked into overdrive trying to kill the virus from the inside. We treated what we could treat but after Super Bowl Sunday we knew we were up against something different.

People started to die. Old people, people with weakened immune systems. Then infants, which was heartbreaking. Those were the most vulnerable populations with any influenza infection, however, so no matter how heartbreaking, it was still understandable and to some extent expected. But then otherwise healthy people started dying as the Haden’s virus just overwhelmed their systems. One kid came into the ER complaining that being sick was messing with his training for the Mohawk marathon in Albany, which was going to be run a couple of weeks later. He was dead by morning.

That was the frustrating thing about Haden’s. Outside the usual at-risk groups for opportunistic viral infections there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to who got sick, who got better and who didn’t. It was like flipping a coin. Heads, you were sick for a day or two and then you were fine. Tails, you were laid up in the hospital for a week. Or you were dead.

About a week into it everyone stopped calling it the “Super Bowl Flu” and started calling it “The Great Flu,” because it was something that just wasn’t stopping. It was like the Spanish Flu in the early 20th Century, except so much faster and so much more.

Benjamin Moldanado:

The parallel with the flu pandemic of 1918-20 was obvious but it’s also inadequate. The Spanish Flu took two years to circle the globe because transportation was slow, and the outbreak happened at a time when the global population was under two billion. There were more than seven billion people on the planet when Haden’s hit, in an era when you can get from one side of the planet to the other in less than a day. The spread of Haden’s was exponentially faster and affected an exponentially larger number of people.

We did have better understanding of disease and a more coordinated global response working for us, but unfortunately given the specific nature of how the Haden’s virus transmitted, those came into play only after the virus had already spread itself across the planet.

Irving Bennett:

We were having a newsroom meeting about how to deal with the coverage and my then editor Brenda Strong said “it’s like a coordinated attack. It’s like this virus has blitzkrieged every single place people live.” And that’s exactly what it was like. We were getting the same news reports that everyone else was seeing and it was astounding. It was literally everywhere. The only place it seemed not to be was the science stations of Antarctica. New Zealand actually stopped flights down to the South Pole to keep it from getting there.

The Haden’s virus went from not even existing to becoming the major global health crisis of the 21st Century in under two weeks. Nothing like that sort of epidemic spread had ever happened before in the history of the world. It was like viruses declared war on humans and were planning to wipe us out before we could mount a counteroffensive.

Thomas Stevenson:

Before we learned of the International Epidemiologist Conference’s winter meeting, we very seriously considered whether this was in fact an attack on the United States by a hostile party, either a nation state or a terrorist group. The problem was none of our chatter had indicated that something like this was in the offing, and this is, to be blunt, one of the things we had tuned ourselves to be looking for. It seemed unlikely to us that something of this scale could have been planned without our hearing of it. The enemies of the United States have a tendency to try to pump themselves up before an attempted attack. We didn’t pick up any gloating transmissions before Haden’s got onto our radar.

Even if Haden’s had been designed to attack the US, it was a very poor instrument for the task. We were hard hit by Haden’s first wave but we and most other western and industrialized countries immediately coordinated our responses and locked down further immediate spread of the disease. It was the places without the ability to effect a coordinated response where the disease really took a bite, both immediately and with the later stages.

This is why, on a personal note, I think biological warfare ultimately never caught on. Attempting to use a biological agent against your enemy while avoiding its effects on you is like trying to use a grenade by holding onto it and hoping all the shrapnel flies in the direction of the person you want to kill. You have to be stupid or suicidal to use biological weapons. Whoever invented Haden’s—if it was invented—was probably both.

Benjamin Moldanado:

Two weeks after Super Bowl Sunday we had a billion people infected worldwide, including fifty million in the United States—roughly one in seven people in both cases. By the end of four weeks it was two billion and eighty million. By the end of the year, 2.75 billion worldwide, ninety-five million in the US. One in three people across the planet got sick. 400 million died—one in every eighteen, just about.

Natasha Lawrence:

The irony today, if you want to call it that, is that people have almost forgotten just how genuinely terrifying that first stage of Haden’s was. Almost four million people died in the US alone, mostly in those first couple of months. That’s like wiping out the entire city of Los Angeles. In an average year, only about two and a half million people die in the US, total. We were barely equipped to deal with all the deaths, simply from the point of infrastructure.

Outside the US and industrialized nations the death toll was even higher as a percentage, and their ability to deal with the dead much lower. And that caused a huge number of problems in terms of secondary waves of disease, infection, and general political and social instability. As bad as it got for us, much of the planet had it much, much worse. There are places on the globe that still haven’t entirely recovered, either in population or in terms of social structures.

Irving Bennett:

Here’s an interesting fact that I learned from one of the anniversary stories coming up—it was only last year that the global population passed what it was when Haden’s first struck. They used to think we’d be at something over eight and a half billion people by now. We’re a billion and a quarter people short. That’s not just because Haden’s killed 400 million people. It’s that many of those 400 million were of childbearing age, and that in the aftermath of the disease, particularly in the developing world, a whole bunch more who would have been parents died in the messes that came after. There aren’t that many things that have ever put that much of a divot into humanity’s growth curve. The only other thing I can think of that most other people know about is the Black Death. That’s pretty impressive company, if “impressive” is the right word to use here.

And even the Black Death usually only attacked each of its victims once.

Monique Davis:

After the first several days of the Super Bowl flu we started getting some of the same patients back into the ER, only this time suffering from symptoms that resembled meningitis. After the first few, those of us on staff started looking at each other like,
you have got to be kidding me
. There was no way it could be coincidence that the same people who had been coming in for the flu were coming back with meningitis-like symptoms. The patients were different races, sexes, economic classes—the only thing they had in common was that they had the Super Bowl flu first.

We started checking around at the other ERs to see if they had the same thing happening, and they did. Patients were coming back with what looked like meningitis. A lot fewer of them than in the first round. Maybe one in four or five. But it was definitely a second stage of some sort. Now, it’s possible for meningitis to be diagnosed as a flu. They share some initial symptoms. But for the same virus to exhibit flu-like symptoms, recede in most patients and then return like meningitis in a select few, that was new. And really sort of frightening.

Benjamin Moldanado:

One of the things that researchers don’t want to admit, because it sounds more than a little bit sociopathic, is how interesting the Haden’s virus was and what things we were hypothesizing in order to explain how it was doing what it was doing. With the meningitis-like symptoms we were confronted with the idea that a virus would attack a body, have the body’s immune response beat it back to greater or lesser extent and then as a result
wholly reconfigure
the way it was attacking the body—but only in a small number of the infected.

Some of the early hypotheses included reactions to blood type or specific antibodies, a signal dependent on total viral load, or a response to specific environmental inputs, like temperature or air quality or even wireless signal. The last of those is an example of how just because it’s a hypothesis doesn’t mean it’s good, or useful. The point was that we were looking for some reason for the virus to apparently mutate, and that led us to be occasionally wildly imaginative in our speculation. It was the most intriguing puzzle that most of us had worked with, and we’re talking about a room full of people whose job it is to work on genetic material and other natural puzzles every day. It was fun—or as fun as anything could be up to the point when you remembered people were out there dying from the thing, and you were supposed to be putting a stop to that.

Our problem was that none of our hypotheses fit the data. There was no obvious single environmental or physical factor we could find that would precipitate the change we saw in the virus. At least not in the short term. This was a problem because everyone wanted to know what they could do to counteract or at least avoid the second phase of the virus attack. And we had nothing to tell them. The only way you’d know whether or not you’d get the second phase of the attack was the headache, the stiff neck, and the other symptoms. You got it or you didn’t.

This was widely considered an unhelpful response from the CDC researchers, and I don’t disagree with that. We were some of the smartest scientists, geneticists, and virologists in the world. We were working as hard as we could on the problem. And it seemed like the problem was working equally hard to elude us.

Natasha Lawrence:

The meningitis phase affected substantially fewer people than the flu phase but the mortality rate was substantially higher. About a quarter of the deaths associated with Haden’s came from people who died in the second phase. That’s because the phase didn’t just present meningitis-like symptoms. The virus invaded deep into the brain and started altering brain structure in significant ways. It was literally making the brain rewire its own connections. That was another thing we didn’t know a virus could really do.

In the lab we would talk about this virus like it was an evil genius. Like it was a Bond villain. It was a joke, and a way to have a little bit of levity in an otherwise depressing race against time. But in some ways it wasn’t a joke at all. I think the general thought around the CDC was that this virus was actually the closest thing to malicious that a virus could get.

Monique Davis:

You could see how the second phase of the virus was working in our patients, the ones that were conscious, anyway. It would be like a series of little strokes. A little aphasia here, some loss of hearing or sight there, someone having a bit of Bell’s Palsy over on the next bed. Sometimes the patient would snap back immediately—the brain rewiring itself on the fly, I guess—and sometimes they’d just get worse. Some of them didn’t progress, they just died. I had one patient stop talking to me mid-sentence. It took me a minute to realize she had passed. I honestly thought she had paused to collect her thoughts.

With the meningitis phase a lot of what we were doing, to be entirely upfront about it, was keeping the patients as comfortable as we could while we waited out whatever the virus was doing to their brain. A lot of people we couldn’t help, and their bodies just sort of let go. Most survived and most of them seemed to recover all right, with lesser or greater short-term cognitive shortfalls that were eventually addressed with therapies similar to what stroke victims get after an incident. Some experienced permanent brain damage, again to a greater or lesser extent—there was no way to tell how bad it was going to be until it was over.

And then there were the people who experienced Lock In.