From A Field Guide to Infectious Agents and Biotoxins:

Blood Borne Pathogens, Part Two, Qualitative -- Instructor's Guide

Good morning, and welcome to the Fire and Rescue Training Academy. This course is Blood Borne Pathogens, Part Two, Qualitative. I will be your instructor, [your name and rank].

You should only be in this room if you have already completed Blood Borne Pathogens, Part One, Quantitative. Is there anyone here who hasn't taken and passed Part One? [Verify that all students have done so.] Good. This class, Part Two, will review and reinforce much of the information that was presented to you in Part One.

Before we begin, please fill out your Course Tracking Card. In section one, please write your name -- last name, followed by first name. In section two, write the date, which is [indicate current date]. In section three, please write your fire or rescue company number. In section four, please write the number of continuing education credits you will receive for this course, which is three. [Allow time for all students to complete their Course Tracking Cards.]

In the first part of this session, I will present the qualitative information on sections one and two: What are Blood Borne Pathogens? and What is Body Substance Isolation? We will take a short break between sections one and two.

Section One: What are Blood Borne Pathogens?

A river of blood encircles the earth. It is the plasma of creation. It is tinged with the hues of birth -- blue breathless gasps and deep red oxygen flares. It emits from the heaving, volcanic heart of the unknowable universe. The river flows through cavities blasted out in the pressure wave of genesis and rubbed smooth in timeless flow. You live within it, a fish adrift in an ocean beyond your understanding. It knows you, surrounds you and sustains you. It flows through you. Your body is almost invisible to it -- not even faint airspaces or a sketch of bones mark your life. But the river recognizes and enfolds you like a pregnant woman with one gentle hand laid over her belly.

In this river you float, along with every other living creature on the earth. You are nothing but a trace outline which the river fills with its fluids. You share this amnion with everyone else you will ever know.

[Show slide #1: "State of Universal Communion with the River of Life."]

Millennia pass in a saline blur. The you that is you begins with a simple skein of membrane, thin as an idea. It is an edge, beyond which you end and the river begins. This single whisper of tissue becomes a wedge the carves out your life from the unformed medium of the universe. Past and future fall to either side of it.

You discover that a change introduced on one side of the membrane does not always pass across it. The currents and temperate swirls of the river fail to roil the fluid within your borders. Your twitches and acid burbling remain enclosed, wholly your own. You are self.

[Show slide #2: "The Membranous Division Into Self and Not-Self"]

[Show slide #3: "Congruence of Nested Systems (Fractal Pattern)"]

You have become a river, with your source conjoined to your effluence. The bloodwaters wend through the smooth caves of your inner core. Within your river, new skins enclose the tiny lights of dependent lives, the soft miracle of edges. Their pores open and close wordlessly, swallowing your sustenance and expelling their minute creations.

You float in the river of blood that girds this earth. You stretch open your intakes and ingest the life giving plasma. You squeeze out moist breaths and the unused remains of your sustenance. You devour the river of creation and leave behind that which is culmination of your desires, built in the material of your own wastes.

The luminescent tide of other lives passes through you, consuming and reconstructing you according to their own unknowable ends.

Are there any questions on the material I've presented in section one? [Allow students to ask questions on this material.]

We'll now take a five-minute break before we begin Section Two. Please be in your chairs promptly at [indicate time].