1/2986 by Annelie Wendeberg Read Free Book Online Page B

sloshing noises when I walk back to my makeshift spruce home. The thing suddenly looks very unprofessional. I was proud of it just after I finished it. Now it seems the pathetic pile will collapse the moment I move in. Carefully, I inch my limbs in, trying not to bump against a weight-bearing branch. It’s too small for me to stretch my legs. From outside, it looks much bigger.  
    With hours to kill, I’m sorting through my potential food sources, and the prospects aren’t good. There’re no edible mushrooms — the season is just about to approach. The blueberries are all gone. Everyone between age five and fifteen, me included, took a bucket, a blueberry comb, and a backpack with provisions into the woods. After two weeks of this, we had stripped naked all blueberry bushes in a radius of ten kilometres around the village. Now the root cellars are filled with jam, sauce, and dried berries — unreachable for me.  
    The blackberries are just getting ripe, and I might be able to find a few handfuls of sweet fruits. No need to even think about nuts, they’re due in two months. If push comes to shove, I’ll eat dandelions. But…yuck.
    My best bets are the rabbit trap and the community orchard. I decide that food really isn’t a problem and open Runner’s book, certain it will bring boredom galore.
    The first chapter shows a picture with piles of corpses.

    The Great Pandemic was caused by two bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Vibrio cholerae , and spread across our planet in several waves, starting in the 1960s.
    Factors leading to the Great Pandemic are considered to have been:
    (A) Elevated atmospheric temperatures and sea surface water temperatures, and thus better growth conditions for pathogenic bacteria.
    (B) Raised seawater levels and heavy rainfalls, causing an elevation of groundwater levels, which resulted in
    (C) flooding of at least 63% of all sewer lines worldwide and substantial fluxes of faecal matter into aquifers, rivers, and lakes, contaminating all major drinking water resources.
    (D) Frequent long-distance travelling of Western and Central Europeans, North Americans, Australians, and Asians by air, sea, and land, facilitating the spreading of virulence factors and antibiotic resistance genes, and later, significantly accelerating the spreading of disease.
    (E) Use of large amounts of antibiotics (in the range of hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year), both for the treatment of disease and for industrial meat production, leading to antibiotics contamination of soils, aquifers, rivers, and lakes, and thus triggering bacterial multidrug-resistance in a great variety of ecosystems.
    (F) Spontaneous acquisition of an extremely potent virulence factor in a multidrug-resistant strain of V. cholerae , and
    (G) prevalence of various multidrug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis since the 21 st century.
      While we cannot ascertain whether the infection with both, tuberculosis and cholera, was the norm, we found evidence for dual bacterial infection in 879 out of the investigated 2176 bone samples. Based on these data and further analyses of bone injuries of various severity (for detailed information, refer to standard works by E.R. McCullough and A.G. Karkarov), a morbidity rate of greater than 40%, with a mortality rate of greater than 80% in the infected population, can be assumed.

    And on it goes. I’ve never heard any of these explanations and — despite reading the chapter twice — I merely understand half of them. What the heck is a morbidity rate? Mortality rate is easy — that’s the number of people who died of disease. But if only 80% of the infected people died, why are more than 99.9% of humans gone? I flip to the index, but can’t find anything by Karkarov or McCullough.  
    The part about the antibiotics reads as absurd. I’ve heard about them and once I even saw one — a few spoonfuls of red powder in a sealed glass flask. It’s one of the most valuable substances to be