The Zombie Autopsies by Steven C. Schlozman

Author:Steven C. Schlozman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780446574174
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2011-03-25T07:00:00+00:00

The “anterior hypothalamus” sat on one card, the “posterior” region on another. And so on…

Gutierrez was smiling and called me to the computer. One of her samples was under the microscope, and its image was projected onto the monitor.

Look at this, she said.

I didn’t see anything. Almost no cells at all. Is the stain OK? What’s wrong with the sample? She didn’t say anything, but changed slides, told me to look again.

This time the histology, the cellular architecture, looked fine. Better than fine. It was intact. Microscopic boundaries were distinct. There was, however, a strange density of mononuclear immune cells. Immune cells devoted to fighting something, but mononuclear cells do not typically attack viruses. At least they aren’t the first-line immune response for most viruses. This was healthy, robust, hypothalamic tissue that was, nevertheless, compromised by something. Some outside pathogen called those mononuclear cells to attack, and the tissue looked different from what we had seen in ANSD infection.

She showed me the note card from the sample I was looking at, the one with the mononuclear cells. It was the “ventromedial hypothalamus.” She pointed to the note card for the previous slide. “Posterior hypothalamus.”

The ventromedial hypothalamus is relatively healthy, infected by one pathogen probably, given the mononuclear cells, but the rest of the hypothalamus is junk. ANSD won’t attack the ventromedial region, she said, or else something that already lives there, some other pathogen, is fighting it off.

Another pathogen? I asked.

She smiled.

11:34 AM

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