Hóa Thi Phấn

Tôi vừa đọc xong quyển The Hot Zone của Richard Preston, rất hấp dẫn! Quyển sách viết lại các sự kiện có thật liên quan đến một trong những dòng họ virus nguy hiểm nhất trong lịch sử nhân loại: họ Ebola (và anh em họ Marburg). Sau đây là một đoạn trích, mô tả người bị nhiễm Ebola (Richard Monet):

The headache begins, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New Year’s visit to Kitum cave-January 8, 1980-Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really didn’t know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with a brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.
…
He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting upæhis bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Monet has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live.

Đại khái, Ebola hoàn toàn có khả năng “hóa thi” một cơ thể sống thành một bọc chất lỏng nhớp nhúa trong vòng vài hôm. Ebola là một loại virus xuất huyết (Hemorrhagic) gây xuất huyết toàn thân. Tỉ lệ tử vong của một số dòng virus thuộc họ Ebola là khủng khiếp: dòng Ebola-Zaire có tỉ lệ tử vong đến 90%. Xem thêm dữ liệu ở CDC cùng với các outbreaks gần đây. Quyển sách của Preston là nguồn cảm hứng của phim outbreak (Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacy)

Đến đây, tôi liên tưởng ngay đến Hóa Thi Phấn của Hải Đại Phú mà Vi Tiểu Bảo dùng để tiêu hủy xác Tiểu Quế Tử. Ebola cũng có thể lây theo kiểu đó: tiếp xúc với máu hoặc các dung dịch khác trong cơ thể – và chỉ cần nhiễm 1 con virus là đi chầu ngay. Ebola còn ghê gớm hơn cả Hóa Thi Phấn. Không nhớ trong các truyện khác của Kim Dung có độc dược nào gây tác dụng tương tự như Ebola không.