Patient Zeros

By Liesl Schillinger

W hat do Monica Lewinsky, Thomas Eric Duncan, and Elvis Costello have in common?1. Monica Lewinsky: 莫妮卡·莱温斯基，前美国白宫见习生，由于在白宫工作时和当时的美国总统比尔·克林顿发生性丑闻，从而引起公众的注意；Thomas Eric Duncan: 托马斯·埃里克·邓肯，美国本土确诊的首例埃博拉病毒感染者；Elvis Costello: 埃尔维斯·科斯特洛，从朋克和新浪潮音乐中涌现出来的英国著名摇滚乐天才。Zero.

Months ago in Philadelphia, at the Forbes Under 30 Summit for young business leaders, Monica Lewinsky received a standing ovation for a public address in which she denounced cyber-bullying and deplored the “empathy crisis” that has arisen since her name went viral, almost 20 years ago.2. standing ovation: 长时间起立鼓掌；denounce: 公然抨击；bully: 欺辱；deplore: 谴责；empathy: 移情，即设身处地地站在别人的位置上，从别人的角度去体验别人的感受；go viral: 像病毒一样传播开来。“I was Patient Zero,” she said; “the first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the internet.” Portraying herself as the Typhoid Mary of online incivility, she told the audience, “I was the most humiliated woman in the world.3. 她视自己为网络暴力下的“伤寒玛丽”，她告诉听众，“我几乎是世界上最丢脸的女人。”portray: 描绘；Typhoid Mary: 伤寒玛丽, 本名玛丽·梅伦，爱尔兰人，1883年独自移民美国，是美国第一位被发现的伤寒健康带原者。据统计，玛丽一生直接传播了52例伤寒，间接被传染者不计其数，该词后指有害事物的传播者或祸根；incivility: 不文明行为。What I want to do now is to help other victims of the shame game survive too.” And then she joined Twitter.

Her timing was excellent. Things like “gamergate” and the iCloud photo hack of celebrity nude selfies, building on a growing list of suicides provoked by vicious texts and posts on cell phones and social media, have fanned public outrage at web-spread harassment.4. 类似“玩家门”和“好莱坞艳照门”事件，手机和社交媒体上的恶意信息和帖子不断导致自杀事件的发生，激起了民众对于网络传播骚扰的愤怒。gamergate:玩家门，2014年9月一场席卷欧美游戏圈的女性游戏制作人的性丑闻；后面的“好莱坞艳照门”指2014年9月1日有外国黑客疑利用苹果公司的iCloud云盘系统的漏洞，非法盗取众多好莱坞当红女星的裸照并在网络发布的事件；vicious: 恶意的；fan: 煽动，刺激；outrage: 愤怒；harassment: 骚扰。Still, online reaction to Lewinksy’s speech was mixed and often snarky, prompting the website Upworthy to reprove flamers: “There’s a lot we can learn from her.”5. snarky: 尖锐的；Upworthy: 成立于2012年，是一个致力于快速传播有意义的信息和图片的资讯网站；reprove:责骂；flamer:（在网络中）抨击别人的人。But was Lewinksy correct to call herself Patient Zero?

提到“零”这个数字，你首先想到的是什么——没有？无？空？或是其他类似的意思？然而，你可知道，在当今互联网传播的作用下，“零”已不再代表这些意思，反而被赋予了“价值”等含义。另外，“Patient Zero”又是什么意思？后来又怎么出现在非医学的领域中了呢？

“Patient Zero” is a phrase that was invented by American doctors and epidemiologists in the 1980s, early in the global AIDS crisis,to supplant the less catchy term “index case.”6. epidemiologist: 流行病学家；supplant:代替；catchy: 引人注意的；index case: 索引病例，指示病例。The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: “The first identified case in a group of related cases of a particular communicable or heritable disease.”7. communicable: 会传染的；heritable:可遗传的。As thousands of people began falling sick in North America with a mysterious,incurable illness, a panicked public wanted to know who had brought the contagion to our shores.8Experts responded with the user-friendly explanation that the culprit was “Patient Zero”—in other words, the original carrier of the disease, who passes it along to others, who passes it along in turn, and so on and so on and so on.9. 专家们用“零号患者”，一个不带有偏见的词语解释事因——也就是说，疾病的最初携带者将其传染给别人，别人又依次传染下去，就这样传染给越来越多的人。culprit: 罪魁祸首。Figuring out who that was, though, was tricky10. tricky: 棘手的。.

Before Patient Zero was a number, he was a letter: he was “Patient O,” an anonymous11. anonymous: 匿名的。“non-Californian” bearer of the virus, whose case was discussed in an American Journal of Medicine study about AIDS,in March 1984. As news of the study circulated, “Patient O” morphed into “Patient Zero,”12. circulate: 传播开来；morph: 变成。and was declared to be Gatan Dugas—a gay Canadian flight attendant who infected many partners with HIV13. HIV: 全称人类免疫缺陷病毒，该病毒破坏人体的免疫能力，从而导致各种疾病及癌症得以在人体内生存，发展到最后，导致艾滋病。before he knew he was sick. Dugas died of AIDS-related kidney failure14. kidney failure: 肾衰竭。the same month the article appeared. Later, though, a prior Patient Zero emerged, a Missouri teenager named Robert Rayford, who died of AIDS in 1969, before anyone knew what it was. In recent decades, as science has made HIV-AIDS more manageable for those who can afford the medication, the words “Patient Zero” have escaped their medical quarantine and invaded the culture, attaching themselves to novels,songs, video games, computer virus outbreaks, and now, the blight of cyber-bullying.15. 近几十年来，随着科技的发展，那些有能力进行药物治疗的艾滋病患者的病情已得到较好的控制，“零号患者”的字眼不再只限于医学范围，而是走进文化领域，用于小说、歌曲、视频游戏和计算机病毒的爆发，现在则用来指导致网络暴力的祸患。medication: 药物治疗；quarantine: 隔离；blight: 祸患。But in the last few months, the advent of another epidemic, the Ebola virus, has brought back the phrase’s original potency.16. 但最近几个月里，另一传染病——埃博拉病毒的传播，却唤起了该词语的最原始的用法。advent: 到来；epidemic: 传染病；Ebola virus: 埃博拉病毒； potency: 效能。In Africa, Patient Zero is thought to be a two-year-old baby named Emile Ouamouno, from Guinea, near the Sierra Leone and Liberia borders,17. Guinea: 几内亚，西非国家；Sierra Leone: 塞拉利昂，西非国家；Liberia: 利比里亚，西非国家。who died in December, 2013. His relatives caught the disease from him and passed it on. In North America,Patient Zero for Ebola was Thomas Eric Duncan, who died earlier last October.

AIDS has killed 36 million people since its emergence in 1981,and about the same number is living with HIV-AIDS today. The 2014 Ebola outbreak has killed nearly five thousand people, thus far. Can cyber-bullying, as reprehensible and destructive as it is,be compared to a plague?18. reprehensible: 应斥责的；plague: 瘟疫。Perhaps, metaphorically, it can; it’s a reasonable imaginative leap, even if it’s in questionable taste(which is an affliction that has no cure).19. metaphorically: 用比喻来说；imaginative: 虚构的；affliction: 折磨。But if so, strictly speaking,Patient Zero would not be Lewinsky, who “caught” the plague,but Matt Drudge, who originated the infection on the Drudge Report in January of 1998, when he exposed Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton, and ushered in the age of aggressive, salacious online gossip-mongering.20. 但如果这样的话，严格来说，零号患者并非莱温斯基，而是马特·德拉吉，他于1998年1月在“德拉吉报道”上揭露莱温斯基与克林顿总统的丑闻后，带有攻击性的下流的八卦便开始在网络上传播开来。Drudge Report: 德拉吉报道，一家美国新闻网站，以挖掘内幕消息而闻名；salacious: 淫荡的；mongering: 散布。Still, all’s fair in love, war, and public shaming; and if Lewinsky wants to claim the title, she might as well.Speaking still more strictly, however, Patient Zero might be better understood as “Patient One.” Why is that? To paraphrase President Clinton, it depends upon what the meaning of the word “zero” is.The nature of “zero,” a non-number, the hold-all for “nothing,” has bedeviled philosophers for millennia.21. hold-all: 手提箱，文中指“……的概括”；bedevil: 使痛苦；millennia: 千年。Zeno of Elea, wrestling with the concept in the fifth Century B.C., mused that “if it were added to another thing, it would not make it larger.”22. Zeno of Elea: 埃利亚的芝诺，希腊哲学家；wrestle with: 设法解决；muse: 沉思。The notion of a Patient Zero implies not only addition, but multiplication, which,paradoxically, hints that the “zero” it bespeaks is something, not nothing.23. addition: 加法；multiplication: 乘法；paradoxically: 自相矛盾地；bespeak: 预示。

One may still be the loneliest number; but these days, zero not only has company, it has fans; and, if you visit Twitter, you will see that cyber-bullying’s newly minted24. mint: 创造。Patient Zero already has 78,000 followers. Parmenides25. Parmenides: 巴门尼德，公元5世纪的古希腊哲学家。may have argued that nothing comes from nothing; Parmenides didn’t know about the internet.