I glanced at it and, instead of picking it up, opened it in my browser to read. Ah. Back to my old friend, Pro-EID Com. Influx of Patients Suffering New-Onset Cognitive Deficits in Madrid, read the headline. I scanned the article and then read it again, more slowly. When I finished, I looked in Wally’s direction and found him staring at me, waiting for my reaction. I kept my voice neutral. “Have we been hearing reports of anything like this here?”

He shook his head. “Haven’t seen any. PubMed isn’t showing anything here; neither is Pro-EID.”

I allowed my gaze to drift, unfocused, beyond Wally as I tried to pin down something hovering at the edge of my consciousness. It flickered in and out of view, tantalizing me. I’d seen something similar to this before, but where? With a cry of victory, I redirected my attention to the computer. “I think I know where to look.”

Wally started toward me but I waved him back. “Sit. I’ll show you from here.”

He aimed a questioning look in my direction but obeyed, shuffling back to his seat at the other end of the vast table. I brought up the Bluetooth menu on my laptop and tapped into the conference room’s AV system. Once the giant screen at the other end of the room displayed my computer’s home screen, I clicked on the menu tab and opened Facebook. “Here we go.”

“Ah,” said Wally, his voice tinny through the amplification system of his mask. “The Scientific Institute of Facebook. Is this data going to be prospective, double-blinded, and peer-reviewed?”

Ignoring him, I entered a private group consisting only of physicians. This one included doctors from all over the world, mainly in the fields of emergency medicine, critical care, and infectious disease. Wally studied the posts. “Why are half these people calling themselves BAFERDs?”

“It stands for ‘bad-ass fucking emergency room doctor.’ Before you ask, I don’t think ID docs have our own bad-ass acronym. Somebody needs to get on that.”

“B-A-I-D-D,” said Wally. “Bay-ad. Bad. It works.”

I navigated to the search bar within the group. Hesitating for a moment, I typed in “cognitive impairment,” then erased it and started over. That was too vague; there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of posts in this group, covering every conceivable range of topic with even the slightest relevance to the practice of medicine as a whole.

Wally caught on. “Try ‘convalescent ART patient,’ ” he suggested.

This brought up a slew of posts, one after another detailing patients who’d recovered from ART only to present months later with confusion, odd behavior, and seizures. I scrolled through them, clicking and opening a few that seemed the most pertinent. After fifteen minutes of intense reading, I slumped back and stared at Wally.

“We need to start collating these,” he said quietly.

I nodded. “Can we get a couple of the EIS officers on it? We need somebody to contact every single one of the posters in this group to get more detail. If this is real . . .”