obligatory friday blog

So here is a quote from a book I'm reading. It is, to me at least, the most beautiful description of the deadly force of a virus on the body. it comes from a book called The Blue Death by Dr. Robert Morris copyright, 2007, HarperCollinsPublishers. pg 80-81

"The bacteria in her small intestine had spent much of the day doubling, and redoubling. As the Vibrio cholerae multiplied, they busily manufactured a deadly poison. The toxin targeted the switches in the lining of the intestine that controlled the flow of bicarbonate, jamming them into the "on" position. Susannah Eley could not notice the initial trickle of fluid that seeped into her gut. but as the numbers of bacteria grew, vast quantities of bicarbonate began to flow into the widow's small intestine.
By hacking into the signal pathways of her digestive system, the bacteria created a surging torrent of acid-neutral fluid, full of nutrients in which they could grow and reproduce. what had been the machinery of digestion became a factory for the production of billions upon billions of pathogens that rode the flood of bicarbonate out into the world in search of other victims. It was not the bacteria, but the river they created that would kill her."