so i just posted a new story yesterday: the emergence of hendra virus in the southwestern united states: a case study

it's formatted and written like a case study, but it's not actually based on a real incident that happened - it's based on a what-if. idk that the style is something that most people will be into, but posting some out-of-left-field infectious disease thing is pretty in-keeping with my character concept, so here we are.

basically, tl;dr, the story is about a small outbreak of a disease caused by a very rare australian virus in the united states that was only identified a year after the fact. this outbreak did not happen, but there was a lot of fact and plausibility mixed in the fiction, so i wanted to unwind it a bit.

hendra virus (the subject of the paper) is a real virus that has caused real disease in both people (very rarely) and horses (still rarely, but more frequently). there is no human vaccine, but there is one for horses, and flying foxes (bat species) do serve as its reservoir host (i.e., an animal it can kind of just chill out in without getting the animal very sick). hendra doesn't seem able to leap directly from bats to humans - as depicted in the case study, it does need an amplifier host (i.e., an intermediary to make help the virus adapt to be able to infect humans). to date, we have only seen horses act as amplifier hosts, but there is some concern about dogs potentially being able to function in that way as well, and cases of hendra in dogs have typically been either asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic.

hendra is not very contagious to humans - basically, horses that are infected typically die in pretty ugly, horrible ways that can lead to humans being exposed to quite a lot of bodily fluid, and occasionally, those humans get sick. however, there have been vets who autopsied horses that have died of hendra without catching it - we're not totally sure what determines who gets sick, though luck seems to play a role. however, if you do catch it, the outlook isn't great - even people who theoretically recover can relapse and die months later.

rural new mexico also absolutely does have a lot of bats, and the white nose syndrome i mention later in the paper is a real thing being actively researched, because it's killed millions of bats in the past 15 years - it's something that's a big concern to the national parks service (along many others), because there's an enormous bat population in carlsbad caverns national park in southern new mexico. the towns i talk about are real places, and they absolutely do get bats flying around at night. the hibernation window is real, and rattlesnake season is indeed a thing - you have to be really careful with your dogs during the summer months, because they'll come right up to your house (i know someone who lost a dog to a rattlesnake bite and had another dog survive a bite during a really bad summer a few years ago). most people i know out there deal with rattlesnakes with either a shotgun or a shovel.

it is also absolutely accurate that other health conditions could easily be missed or misdiagnosed during a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic - when the healthcare system gets overloaded, everything suffers and things get missed.

so that's all real.

the fiction, of course, is that there is no evidence that hendra has left australia, and flying foxes are their only known reservoir. we also have no evidence (last time i checked) of dogs either contracting hendra directly from bats or passing it to humans - it's a concern, but it's very much a theoretical "this might happen" rather than something that's a current active problem.

it's always possible that hendra could leap to other bat species, but it's not at all a given. bats are reservoir hosts for many, many viruses, and generally, viruses focus on specific species rather than infecting a lot of them (both for biological and geographic reasons). that said, the process of adapting to a new host definitely can change how a virus is transmitted and who it can be transmitted to - e.g., hendra only being able to infect people after it adapts to a horse.

this has not happened, and probably this specific thing will never happen, but this is definitely along the lines of how these things do sometimes happen.

tl;dr, i wanted to give people nightmares. legit, though, please exercise extreme caution around bats, because they can carry a bunch of nasty stuff.

(if you want to know why hendra is only emerging now, theories about why bats may be such common reservoir hosts, or some other point expanded on, lmk - idk if others find this stuff as interesting as me.