Patient Zero Poem by Shaun Cronick

Patient Zero.
Sounds awful doesn't it.
I'll write it again.
Patient Zero.
Just the word patient is bad enough.
It conjures up,
Illness,
Sickness,
A carrier of bad health.
Like Typhoid Mary.
Mary Mallon.
Patient Zero.
A term used in a scary Michael Crichton,
Stephen King or Robin Cook novel.
Then there's the word zero,
It may as well be a twisted anagram of the word doom.
Zero, it pitilessly offers no hope.
You can imagine it...
Investigators for The World Health Organization,
Tracing a pandemic back to a remote,
Peasant village at the extreme northern edge of the,
Sino-Russian border.
Seeking Patient Zero.
Where some had died though many were in good health.
Taking blood samples from the living,
And cultivated them into a crash-course mass vaccine.
And it cured the infected.
Saving many lives,
Worldwide.
We found no results in,
The local water tables,
Wells, rivers, streams, etc.
No trace in any food,
Especially meat based local produce.
And nothing in the surrounding wildlife,
Dead or living.
We examined graves old and new to no results.
And there were no visitors for many weeks,
Before the outbreak,
The village being so remote and in wintertime.
We're baffled as to how,
And very worried also,
Of the real source/cause or trigger,
That started this pandemic.
It maybe still out there.
And if it is, it will evolve like all viruses,
Making the current cure redundant.
Hopefully sunlight will eradicate it.
But if it survives and evolves,
And is carried on prevailing winds,
It could seek out a new,
Patient Zero.