The Great Cure

By Regis Rodriguez

Set in the first half of the twenty-first century, George Fillmore, a Texas-born, New York–based medical researcher, and Adam El Del Rio, a Dominican medical researcher, are experimenting on an advanced treatment for a rare form of cancer. The experiment would transform into multiple, natural cures in one. It soon becomes a historic mission in eliminating the majority of common and deadly diseases, including diabetes, Alzheimer's, and HIV/AIDS worldwide in a matter of months, thus, calling the invention and campaign The Great Cure. In opposition of this medical breakthrough are pharmaceutical companies and many of its workers, who fear not only losing their jobs but are also uncertain this potential medical breakthrough will save millions of lives. The Great Cure is a multicity, sci-fi tale that takes place worldwide, notably in cities like New York, where George and his girlfriend, Amanda Dawes, an entertainment reporter, lives; in Los Angeles, where an African-born medical school couple, Kefla Abu and Ama're Ofiaja, reside; and in Rome, where Benita D'Agastino, a researcher, works for the World Health Organization, lives with her preteen daughter Marina, who suffers from autism. Washington, DC, Santo Domingo, and London are also primary cities set in The Great Cure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684566945

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Headlines

Amixture of notable headlines reported of a single news story, one that’s all too common by the early twenty-first century, affecting millions of lives worldwide.

CBS Evening News narrated that by the year 2050, approximately one in eighty-five people internationally will suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia in which people over the age of sixty-five lose their memory and social skills, and have difficulty with language. There were between twenty-nine and forty-four million sufferers in total by the end of 2016.

We are facing, potentially, an epidemic of Alzheimer’s on the horizon because the entire baby-boomer bubble is now moving into the age of risk, so in a system, which is already strained with this problem. What’s coming is going to be even more. There’s going to be a greater incidence of Alzheimer’s that we’re not prepared, Dr. Kenneth Kosik, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara said for the duration of the 2011 interview with CBS News.

Sadly, we don’t know a single individual that has been cured of Alzheimer’s or either a drug treatment or spontaneously. That’s quite different than other very serious diseases. We’re looking very, very hard for a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, a cure, but it’s not around the corner. It’s not going to happen tomorrow and it’s very unlikely that is even going to happen next year, Dr. Kosik continued.

NBC News advises that between four and five hundred million persons globally now live with diabetes, type 1 and type 2, including above twenty-nine million Americans and over fifteen times that on Earth and counting.

The CDC said today the number of Americans with diabetes continue to climb dramatically, and one in four don’t know they have it, NBC News anchor Brian Williams said in a 2014 report on NBC Nightly News.

According to BBC World News, more than thirty-five million humans in the world have either HIV or AIDS, a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus often called HIV and often spread through unprotected sexual intercourse, contaminated blood transfusions, as well as hypodermic needles. Since its discovery in 1981, AIDS has caused about thirty-six million deaths by the end of 2012. As a consequence, life expectancy in the African countries of Zambia and Botswana remain downwards to thirty-three and thirty-five years correspondingly. Sub-Saharan Africa stays put as the region is terribly affected by means of the pandemic.

MSNBC reports that autism, a disorder of neural development characterized by aired social interaction and communication and by restricted and repetitive behavior, has been rising up in cases among children since the 1980s.

In an alarming study released this week, the CDC now estimates one in sixty-eight children have been identified with an autism spectrum disorder. That’s a 30 percent jump from a 2008 study and represents a steady rise in cases over the last decade, news anchor Craig Melvin reported in 2014.

The equivalent news channel makes public that in excess of one to two per thousand people around the world have a medical condition from particular forms of autism.

The statistics in concurrence from HLN makes public that one in two men, as well as one in three women, will be diagnosed with cancer in his or her lifetime. One thousand and five hundred Americans succumb to the disease daily, one every minute. Close to four thousand and five hundred people are diagnosed with cancer solely in the United States every single day. The 2012 episode of the HLN show Morning Express also points out breast cancer, which affects both women as well as men.

Furthermore, Fox News Channel emphasizes that some seventeen million people suffer from the stroke in the planet year by year. Of these, more than five million victims perish and another five million become incessantly disabled. Men are 30 percent more likely to have a stroke, but 60 percent of all stroke fatalities come about in women. The panelists also reveal warning signs of a stroke including slurred speech, loss of vision on one side and an inability of moving or feeling on one side of the body.

The syndicated TV program Inside Edition informs the community that heart disease kills in general six hundred thousand Americans. Borrowing from the World Health Organization, also known as WHO, chronic illness as a whole is responsible for 63 percent of all deaths globally, with cardiovascular disease the leading cause of death in the entire world.

CBS Sunday Morning cautions that men are one and a half times more likely to make a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease than women, a degenerative disease which intensifies with age. A calculated approximately ten million people worldwide are living with Parkinson’s disease as of present day, putting the cost to roughly twenty-five billion dollars for every year just in the United States.

And in an additional commentary, this time coming from CNBC, declares that in the United States alone just over 16 percent of its citizens don’t have health insurance, and some who undergo pre-existing conditions are likely to pass away due to rising costs per capita. In distinction to the parallel network, disease, in general, is also the top cause of bankruptcy in the country.

These indicators become all the more frequent during the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century, with the startling upswing of each common disease.

Many of the world’s most accomplished news anchors and reporters, from ABC to CNN to MTV News, respectively all say the following:

Every single disease is important, and for these times within these issues, you really need to take your health very seriously in this time period.

Everyone is at risk, no one is safe.

As of today, there’s no cure.

The news bulletin excerpts refer to today’s biggest and deadliest diseases, which are so many to cipher.

Chapter 2

Adam

H ey, Adam. How’s it going? a random male spectator said.

"Muy bien (Very good!) yelled Adam El Del Rio whilst driving his 2020 Nissan Leaf from the Malecón to the beach known as Punta Cana and turned up to the bridge of the metal song Do It Again" by the band Boiler Room in his car.

Adam is a thirty-one-year-old medical researcher based in Santo Domingo.

"On my way to the beach for a quick swim at Punta Cana, a week before a key mission northeast of the Dominican Republic to find a medical breakthrough of some sort. That’s my duty as a medical researcher. I go to Nueva York in two months," Adam said with a thick Spanish accent.

Adam is bilingual in English besides Spanish. He is also tall, slender, has a cross tattoo on his lower right arm, and has a buzz cut.

After a prompt swim at the beach in a luminous weather, Adam runs off almost immediately.

About to leave right now, because next week is soon enough, Adam typed on his laptop computer on his Facebook page, where he has about two thousand friends.

In the Dominican Republic, Adam starts his travel with his 2020 Nissan Leaf, an electric car, throughout the seldom reconnoitered easternmost location of the country, an attempt to find a rare medical discovery and then taking to the air to New York as soon as New Years for medical experimenting on a couple of mice. With the temperature close to the upper seventies and sunny, Adam wears mostly an all-green clothing.

"El agua es buena, el tiempo lo permite hoy en día (The water is good, the weather today is fine)," Adam uttered to himself unobtrusively in Spanish.

Adam stepped out of the electric car right after using his GPS; in front of the palm and coconut trees all over, presumptuous that it’s the adequate locale. According to Adam, it’s his own understanding of Mother Nature, based on what’s said being fluent in Spanish.

I’m guessing a palm tree or at least something close. This has got to be the place, right over here, Adam said in English all by himself.

Adam first got to the setting, began to discern a waterfall known as Salto Alto de Bayaguana, picked up his square-shaped glass bottle out of inquisitiveness and captured the rarest spring water, yearning it would work as a key element. About an hour into the future, Adam glimpsed steadfastly at an unusual rectangular-shaped plant with small thorns in which he believes can heal a variety of pain. Adam collected the plant prior to combining it into the glass bottle full of spring water and coconut meat. Adam calls the peculiar plant Tejas, a Spanish spelling of a Caddo word taysha, which means friend or ally.

Shortly thereafter, as the sun began to set, Adam hiked through the mountainous village, was greeted by young and old inhabitants, opened his car trunk and picked up a glass jar with rubber gloves that are red on the exterior and gold in the interior to capture a trio of blue scorpions from one of the largest scorpion reservations on Earth. He sliced off the tip of each scorpion’s