A survivor of the Battle of Rourkes Drift, on his deathbed screamed “The Zulus are coming to kill us.” He was safe at home in England, but he never left Africa. Jenny Lou screamed at me, for quite some time about the rape of a baby, accused me of being a baby raper, and accused me of being Carleton Gajdusek. She was dying in a nursing home in Fort Smith Arkansas, but she never left Cincinnati children’ hospital.
Her story is incredible, that she caught Carleton Gajdusek in the act of raping and murdering a baby. She was a screaming dying old lady, disinhibited by fear and disease, cursing me and raging so sincerely that when she started screaming about a baby, I looked around for the child.
During the summer of 1977, while destroying files of merchant mariners under the FOIA, a coworker passed a file to me that didn’t seem as fantastic as a great many of the war stories we read while being specifically told not to. Unbelievable stories. Submarines, torpedoes, mines, stories of the merchant marine after the war, The Texas city explosion health and dental files, prostitutes in Baltimore( some quite famous if the files are to be believed),but the file of our concern was, uh dull.
After declaring war on Germany in December 1941 French flagged ships were seized in US ports. On one commercial vessel anchored in NYC, a Frenchman was seized and held. A WWI veteran, he joined the US merchant marine. He shipped out of New Orleans on a trip to Maracaibo to bring latex to the US. During the trip he became unable to perform his duties, and was put off the boat in Maracaibo, where he died of “alcoholic dementia”.
While he was stateside, he was a blood donor. His blood was processed into serum and freeze dried. His serum was reconstituted and given to a wounded airman, who recovered from his burns and broken bones suffered in a training accident. The airman did not return to service. He died of a nonspecific neurological disorder.
Shortly thereafter, a number of other recipients of freeze dried serum died of nonspecific neurological disease. These recipients did not receive serum from the dead Frenchman or the pilot trainee; they received serum that had been processed through the same freeze dryer. The cleaning and disinfecting step used did not prevent the passage of some agent that caused the disease.
The cleaning and disinfecting steps used would prevent the transmission of any known pathogen, and the materials used in the processing aren’t known to be neurotoxic.
This is an interesting problem.
First thing, quarantine the freeze dryer and ancillary equipment.
Second thing, there is a war on, when it is over, get some good researchers to figure out what the hell happened.
