A recent outbreak of the deadly Hendra virus in far North Queensland has locals spooked as one rural pocket in Townsville reels, facing a potential health crisis after the death of a family horse.
The rare and lethal virus--first recognized in humans and horses in 1994 with the death of trainer Vic Rail--is marked by extreme respiratory difficulties, accompanied by soaring body temperatures, profuse and generally bloody nasal discharges, and depression, another pervasive symptom.
Hendra is thought to be contracted via contact by horses with the urinary or body matter of flying foxes, although cats, too, have proven to be susceptible: one may prove to be the missing link in the Townsville case. A domestic cat belonging to the same family has been diagnosed as a carrier of the disease, despite the animal displaying only a few symptoms itself.
The horse--’Flea’-- struck down by the virus may have succumbed after ingesting the waste matter of one of the flying foxes which fill the area, or have been infected by the cat. Flea was kept in the yard of a neighbor and family friend, Annette Lewis, who details looking through her kitchen window to see him collapse into the mud.
“We heard an almighty crash and rushed out to find him on the ground. From there on, it was so quick there was almost no time to figure out what was wrong,” she recalls.
Annette nursed the horse into its excruciating last hours, unwitting of the possible health risk, and along with her family has had to endure the agonizing wait for an all clear from the Hendra virus’s death stamp.
“I have a fifteen year old boy who had to get tested, too,” the mother of four says. “It’s been tough, the just waiting to find out whether you’re going to have to go through the same thing as we saw in Flea.”
Hendra is believed to be capable of transmission to humans who have come into direct contact with the bodily fluids--nasal discharges, blood or saliva--of infected horses, or via inhalation of contaminated aerosols. For anyone coming within close range of a sick animal, the use of protective masks, gloves and fastidious hygiene practices are essential.
This is particularly true if the proliferation of more animal to human viruses feared by scientists is to be effectively prevented. US National Centre for Infectious Diseases doctor Nina Marano estimates that of the 12 top ‘bioterrorist’ diseases, eleven originate from animals.
With figures like these, the Hendra virus is not the only possible contender as far as epidemics go. Against a backdrop of ever encroaching viral menaces like the respiratory virus SARS and the African HIV crisis, this most recent viral eruption simply poses grave questions for Australia’s health outlook.
Are the nation’s health officials prepared to cope in the event of a nightmare scenario, particularly with the current chronic doctor shortages? What conditions are likely to give rise to such a scenario? Contrast the Hendra virus--admittedly one that has reared up only intermittently in the decade or so since its identification--with SARS.
Like the Hendra virus, SARS can be mapped back to animals, having sprung up first on farms in the southern China province of Guangdong, where pigs and ducks are farmed in close confines with chickens and fish. It began with a small scale rural outbreak, then spread feverishly once carriers reached the cities.
A vaccine for SARS has not yet been found. It may, however, be of some comfort that a new vaccine against Hendra has been developed and, according to Australian virologist Bruce Mungall, tested on cats to positive results. The vaccine is expected to be ready for use within three years.
If the North Queensland case is anything to go by, medical advances like the new vaccine are in desperate demand, not least for the residents of rural farming areas like Annette Lewis and her son.

    It seems to me that I will always remain on this slow trajectory in retrograde, each moment lived a piece of wintering like the swift sharp withering of the plum’s burgundy, my eyes always cast backwards, lips perpetually spelling Sundays already devoured. I am made of strong stuff, I know, but the fact is that my steel and copper are of a soft sort, mutable and easy to the touch of any hot iron, any stamp of that fragrant, fertile violet for which I would search a thousand years without complaint. Things, people, places and experiences all touch me and mark me for nostalgia even before I have had the chance to drink them, they press themselves upon me so that I am left with little but the impressions of roses and sweet wet green grasses like flags against the surface of my mind. Have you ever felt that you would rather die than see the end of a few perfect days, a few score of seconds so beautiful you would like to bottle them in a clear jar to pull out again later, when you are able to watch them moving against the glass like rockets, butterfly-lithe fireworks that they are, too quick to spread wings and too swift to fade, crackerbursting lilies, fiery worms. I feel the grief of things before they are over, I feel their pregnant loveliness before they open their mouths to squall, and they are dear tender sorrowful babes in my arms. I guess hunger is in my constitution, I guess this is the way it goes, I guess all things must pass: still, I wonder, why am I so slow to mutate and why do I find it so difficult to leave the viscous waters of the mind’s ponds, even when it is clear that they are the shackles I fear so?

O woe, I'm so sick. All I want is go to bed for a week and I can't, having too much to do and no time to do it in. My throat feels like a flame-bird, raw scarlet and squawking.

Oh, I know, I'm never here anymore and I never got to use the extra icons Aubrey paid for (I made some on my brother's computer and its internet connection promptly died!), but I'm sorry and I love you. Honestly.

I suppose I should step in to say that I am alive, if quiet. also: I am bursting to announce that I am going to see David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac in Brisbane mid-February (!!).

    Perhaps the problem is that I am facing all this in the wrong fashion, with too much fierceness and meanness of spirit, the whole of it welling beneath my chest as a brutish battle cry, ineluctable, while the salty, pearl-plated and gnarled rod I hold within my hand wavers ferocious, shakes. I don’t know how to handle this ocean-staff, this spear, I have forgotten, and though the knowledge often lurks at the corners of my dim skull like a gnawing, cobwebbed phantom, I have not the skill to retrieve it without many years of patience and tenacity. Warriors, such as I am, are not meant to battle lightly, or without great thought and reason beforehand, yet I suppose it is because I am so frightened of failing this war that I seem to remember but rarely. Should a painter maul his tubes of dye and oil as though they were enemies conquerable, should he use his brush as sword, palette as shield, easel as grassy bare battlefield? Are these things companions in arms or are they torments and spoils? Tell me, what should I do? Words and thoughts, I wrestle with them until I feel bare and torn, garments savaged and threads hanging, always dangling where I may not grasp them. I forget that I am only a scribe on her way to another port -- not even a scribe, but a messenger alone, humble, the riches others have mined my cargo. I am waylaid, for I have fallen so deeply in love with the task of delivering news that all my being has become bent on the process, and I use my spear in ways it was not meant to be used. Instead of using the rod to divine and shape, I stab the words, opals of thought, so that they wither, wither into grey weeds and brown downs half dead. Void of tales, I discover myself lonely, and when I look in on the gardens I am meant to protect, I see that the growing things have all gone.

    So: I feel I have no choice but to be silent, weathered, worn and listening for the wind to rattle past again.

    I cannot help feeling terribly sorry for the person who wrote this article.

    I would like to feel very dry inside, deep in my belly, arid enough for my stomach to become full with brittle leaves and desert barren enough for your footfall through my life to sound as heavily as the floral, subterranean gong of a wooden bell. I want to hear the crisp, clean crunch of your bare soles through my glade, to feel the deer stir and look about with their wide, liquid chocolate and dolorous eyes. Their feet should stir at the chimes of your voice and give me the breadth of grace, frail fawn legs tottering and dancing, elegant as butterflies, elegant, as though the butterflies, blue as forget me knots, were flitting about the noses of all my spotted deer. Of all the things I desire, the wish most strong is the one where I live aided merely by air, daydreams, water and the moss-winged, lustrous little creatures that pin the world up to the stars with their fluttering, floating backs. Kin to Cinderella’s dressmakers they are, and the sky is like her cornflower skirts, a transparent, watercolour stretch of soft, shimmering fabric held up to measure against the jewels of the planets, the divine, long limbed and dusky ebony body of space. Oh what I would give for the poise of that princess, her perfect symmetry, the mathematical balance of her systems, the speckled cream of her galaxies, the musk and daisies smell exuded by her fine jaw and the way the beautiful butterflies come to her, rest on her palms as if recognising the precision of her revolving worlds. The colour of this song is just how I feel, saturated in lavender and pearl, caramel and soft greys, which is as best as I can describe the hue, though it is not exactly right and all the shades are mingled in my mind, like cobwebs shot through with one another.

    I hate being good but not genius, a rook with flight but no dive, no beak in which to catch fish, flounder and their coruscating metallic scales that slip, singing, like the oil of a rainbow between the teeth.

    A black swan’s feather makes up half of my drawn, quartered, conflicted person, and it is light, untethered, swift to chase the air and to follow the smell of roses and honeyed bees, the salt scent of that dense, green ocean. Easily it wafts and happily, it does not fear what will become of it when it is severed from its past permutations, its old haunts and pastimes, and afraid? It is not frightened by the dark things, with their coarse shapes and thick, voluptuous spaces, red and black, larger than themselves and hiding dimensions within their shadows though they are.

    Even while it flies freely, it feels for its cloistered, cramped sibling, the other half, for it remembers how it was to cling to the flesh, dreaming pure dreams against the body that had been birth. This second sibling is snowy and sits stiffly in its place, determined to stay with the wings of the mother bird and sure that elsewhere, filth and grime would permeate its white self so that it would become oily, ashamed, guilty. It is a poor thing -- wracked with grief to think that one day it will come loose and fall away from the whole, filled with rage at its own secret imaginings. Clean feathers should not want, it feels. It feels, perpetually. Expectations and ideals pin its downy form.

    Really, in point of fact, it is the blackest of the two, because its anchor goes deep and binds. The high opinions and morals it holds so dear are crippling, and if the mother bird -- weighty, flightless swan on the lake -- is ever to take wing, this white feather must drop. I have to shed it, my uptight half, and let it float with the black first feather until they mingle, until I am not so inhibited that I feel I may choke. I could have a rainbow tail, plumed, if only I were to choose not to bandage it so tightly.

    'Flimmer' ought to be a word. Flickering, fluttering and shimmering, like a mirage, a candle in a brown paper bag.

    Oh!! Aubrey, I heart-heart-heart you! Those two notifications were such lovely things to receive so close to one am. I'll make a userpic or two in honour of you, darling dearest. You're a wonder. Happy December. <3

    Ｉ‘m all grey and melancholy today, languid and plaintive as a rotund little curled worm, and I don’t know quite what to do with myself. I’m not at work because I’m sick and besides, the whole world seems to me to be quite sad and ill at the minute. It’s the rain, I think, I can’t abide it. It’s been drizzling and driving at us with slippery, watery needles and points all day, and the clouds have been grumbling amongst one another, as though frustrated with their own work and fiercely bothered about bumping grizzling, blackened bellies so often. I don’t know, I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy. Rather, I feel dulled, like I am a tiny, slender green blade of grass and my head has been hammered with such ferocity that I have grown all bent of dewy back. I am impossibly vexed of spirit and in the kind of state that can only suppose no sun will ever deign to shine on my wild, sodden soldier’s countenance again. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.

    Something has happened to me, and I have not been myself for a long time. I know I could find it again, the grotto in the pit of my belly where there are pearls, silvery mermaids, diaphanous rocks and thick, luminous green waters, but it is as though there is a wall where the rivers of my nerves snake to and from my poor coiled brain, and I cannot move it, I cannot climb it. No matter how much of a salty, crystalline imp I may be, I cannot slip past it, I cannot dislodge the onerous red bricks from their places, and nor can I succeed in pulling away all the weeds, vines and sinuous lavender wildflowers that grow between its cracks. There is no longer any room left for spritely thoughts to skip through my head and down to my dancing fingers, for I have grown old and my concentration is too poor to flutter after the great yellow banana butterflies that are wont to meander about my overworked, overused heart, flapping their silken wings in the wake of fairytales. I can’t seem to think in long distance anymore, and I don’t know if it’s emotional, or physical, or if it stems from having ill treated myself, or if it‘s because I tried to make myself outgrow my fancies and managed to succeed. I don’t want to have become weathered and decrepit of imagination. I'm always tired behind the eyes and always too busy with profound matters to worry about the things that matter.

"Why must people kneel down to pray?" If I really wanted to pray I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep, woods, and I'd look up into the sky--up--up--up--into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just FEEL a prayer. Well, I'm ready. What am I to say?" --Anne of Green Gables.