Micrograph of OK brain parasite at the 1 micron length phase.
The evidence, according to Dr. April F. Mayheu, was sporadic at first. People walking aimlessly off sidewalks into traffic, others babbling nonsense like drunks, or experiencing paranoid hallucinations driving the human host to attack anything in sight. Meanwhile others were beset by graphic nightmares leading into violent sleep walking episodes.. Other patients somehow forgot their actual pasts and subconsciously recreated them with fictitious ideations of experiences they never had. In so doing they lost their identities and many have had to be hospitalized in psych wards.
Dr. Mayheu observed in her patients that as the brain infestation progressed the victims appeared to suffer a kind of dementia that later included paralysis. After several died, she recovered neurological tissue slides and discovered the parasites feeding voraciously on brain tissue - consuming up to two grams per day.. Worried first that it was a novel form of Toxiplasma, she ran DNA tests and concluded the vicious beasties had never been detected before. They didn't conform to any known parasites (like schistosomiasis), and worse, their reproduction was almost malignant once inside a human brain. Tests on removed, healthy ape brains showed the entire brain usually devoured within a week.
While the parasites were barely one micron in length when first hatched from eggs, Dr. Mayheu noted that within 6 weeks they had reached 60 microns and eventually - if unchecked - could attain a length of six inches between fang end and tail. By this stage most patients had expired and it was just has well, as according to the researcher: "Their brains had turned into pink and gray mush".
The origin of the parasites remains a mystery but Dr. Mayheu's team believes they have traced the main outbreaks to the vicinity of fracking wells. Evidently, the forced pressure of the hydro-fracturiing process displaced the parasites from their underground lairs whereupon they were ejected to the surface in the expelled fracking fluid called "brine".
The researchers conjectured the unusual parasites - temporarily named "Zombies" because of their voracious brain-eating - to have somehow reached nearby water sources, infecting them, and made their way into municipal water systems where they could infect brains en masse.
So far, the greatest density of parasites in brains has been found near the famous "Jones swarm" of earthquakes, believed to have been incepted by fracking. (Researchers at Cornell had already showed using computer models that such quakes could be triggered by excess pressures stressing the many faults that lay beneath the crust of the Sooner state).
At least one neurobiologist and parasite expert on Mayheu's team has speculated that the recent episode of racist chants by SAE frat boys from OU might be traced to the action of the zombie brain parasites. She conjectures they might have entered the lads' brains while they were swimming in an infected pool, or possibly from drinking water....or tainted beer. Once they were feeding on the brains the chants would have been unleashed.
Dr. Mayheu discounts this, asserting that she doesn't believe the parasites have the power to alter human behavior if that predisposition isn't already there. However, at least one monograph - Parasite Rex- maintains that tapeworm cysts embedded in delicate human brain tissue do this all the time.
Much more work remains to be done and in the meantime Mayheu and associates advises all Oklahomans to boil their tap water before drinking it - especially if they live near fracking operations or disposal wells.
Also, to avoid further infection, residents are warned that the parasites can be spread by sexual relations. The creatures are able to easily move from an infected brain outwards through the nostrils to a non-infected person. This is by contact once they escape and are then able to enter the nostrils and brain of a healthy person.
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