Plague Hits Sohalia

Sohalian plague virus

The so-called Sohalian fever is running rife again in all three of the inhabited worlds in the system of Sohalia (-1,5). Symptoms range from the starting signs of a mild head cold with tension headache and run rapidly through to pyrexia together with gastro-intestinal pain, hameorrhagic diarrhoea, haematemesis and death within twelve hours of onset. Both pulmonary and neurological variants have been reported with sudden onset pneumonia in the former and progressive paresis, ataxia and collapse in the latter.

The disease is highly contagious and the infectious period is twenty four hours before the onset of symptoms making it particularly difficult to isolate infected individuals. There is some evidence to suggest that the plague was engineered at the Imperial research laboratories and that Sohalia was used as a testing ground although this has always been strenuously denied by the Imperial authorities.