Read Grantville Gazette - Volume V for Free Online

Catherine, holding up a pretty black lace choker. "But business is business," she said firmly.

    * * *

    Fortunately Nicki Jo's nervousness vanished within the first five minutes of the meeting. It helped that the governor-general, Louis de Geer, was effectively chairing the meeting. Colette Modi was De Geer's niece, and frequently invited Nicki Jo and Catherine to go along to the De Geer household for holiday visits. It was often a fun madhouse, since Louis de Geer had ten children under the age of eighteen.

    The other two men at the meeting had been introduced as Alessandro Scaglia and Pieter Paul Rubens, diplomats from the Spanish Netherlands. Nicki Jo's eyes had widened a bit upon being introduced to the famous painter, but she had put a firm throttle on her desire to gush.

    Her nervousness totally vanished when she heard what the diplomats were doing in Essen.

    "Chloramphenicol? You want to make chloramphenicol ? Why in God's name would you want to waste your resources trying to do that?"

    Louis de Geer started to chuckle but quickly turned it into a cough. "Excuse me, Miss Prickett. Please continue."

    Rubens waved his hand. "We have dozens, scores of soldiers dying every day from typhus, Miss Prickett. Surely we should do what we can to save their lives."

    Nicki Jo suppressed a sarcastic remark. How typical. Keep the soldiers alive but screw the damn women, children and other civilians. 

    "I'd like to help you gentlemen, really I would, but the Essen Chemical Company won't be ready to produce chloramphenicol for at least another six months." She took a deep breath. "And when we do, I have to say that it is highly unlikely that we would sell you any for saving soldiers dying of typhus. Are you aware of what's coming to the lower Rhine Valley in 1635 and 1636?"

    Scaglia and Rubens both shook their heads.

    "Plague, gentlemen, bubonic plague. An epidemic bad enough that we found a few references to it in our books in Grantville, although the details were very sketchy. Even in Amsterdam, if the history holds true, the epidemic will kill twenty percent of the population. In the Rhine valley itself, it'll likely be much worse. In the history we came from, many of the towns saw sixty to seventy percent of their population die. So all of our chloramphenicol is going to go towards keeping plague victims alive over the next couple of years. But chloramphenicol is the cure, anyway. What about prevention?"

    Rubens looked at her with a puzzled expression. "Prevention?"

    Nicki Jo nodded. "A man named Benjamin Franklin in my country up-time had a wise saying that is very apropos here: 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.' You would do much better to prevent typhus, rather than trying to cure it after it strikes."

    She frowned. "And something else comes to mind, for that matter. How do you know it's really typhus, in the first place? As I recall from lectures I went to in Grantville before I moved to Essen, typhus and typhoid were not distinguished by doctors prior to the mid-nineteenth century. So maybe some of your typhus cases are actually from typhoid, which has a different disease vector entirely. And then there are diarrheal diseases. Similar vector to typhoid. If you really want to lower the death rates for everyone, not just the army, you need to work on prevention."

    Nicki Jo smiled at De Geer. "Like we are doing here in the Republic. Isn't that so, Governor-General?"

    Louis de Geer smiled back. "Correct, Miss Prickett."

    "What you need, gentlemen," Nicki Jo continued, "is a complete arsenal of products to fight disease, particularly bacterial diseases that are easily transmitted by insects. Typhus is a bacterial disease that is transmitted by lice, so you need an insecticide that can be effective at killing lice. You also would like that insecticide to kill fleas, since fleas carry the plague. In addition you want a rodent killer, since rats carry the fleas that carry the plague. Then you also want