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~new~ VAMPIRE POSTCARDS ~new~ VAMPIRE POETRY ~new~
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Blood Vampirism
Essays on Vampirism written by various authors in order to better understand the Vampire, not from one person's point of view, but rather from several very different individuals. Please remember, if you would like to use any of these essays, ask first.
Also, please note the following: Apparently, there is a crusader or two who claim to be "real" vampires who disagree with some of the information we are providing on this site, and so, are running rampant through the vampire community doing their best to discredit the Vampire Legacy Society. Also apparent is the fact that they neglected to read through the rest of the site where it plainly states in several places that we post ANY and ALL information on the vampire to let the visitor formulate their own opinions, instead of merely taking the word of one person. According to them, we should seperate out certain articles, and put them on a "bullshit" page, or a fictional vampire page, whether or not they deal with the topic at hand. Well guess what? I'm not going to do that. Because who are we, and who are they, to say what is fact or fiction? No one knows the entire truth about vampirism, which is why there are so many sites attempting to find out. So, I am going to warn you, the visitor, to read through all of the articles, formulate your own opinion, and know, that we at the Vampire Legacy Society do not necessarily agree with ALL of the views presented on these pages, we merely collect them, and post them.
As well, as soon as I find out for sure who these people are that insist on trying to destroy the vampire community from within by claiming to be real vampires, and trying to discredit sites where many members have spent many hours researching articles to bring them to you, I will post their name, any contact info I can get, where they hang out, and whatever else I can dig up on them and post that information at the top of each page, along with this notice, so that you, the visitor, can contact them for yourselves, and I encourage you to do so.
As well, I encourage you the visitor to visit our forums, find the General Discussion forum, particularly one started by Broken Ghost, read through the threads, and post your own thoughts.
Also let it be noted, that the above narrative does not come from the entire membership, it comes entirely from the Founder, Tattunigma. And I have no problem whatsoever defending the honor and hard work of the membership here at the Vampire Legacy Society.
by FANGLADY
Our body's immune system can be thought of as a nifty little defense mechanism designed to answer one question: is a given molecule part of us, or part of something else? For example, if I inject a *foreign* protein into an individual, that person's immune system will quickly recognize that protein as being 'non-self' and act to destroy it. On the other hand, the immune system is able to recognize the multitude of proteins that are native to that person's body as being 'self', and do not attack those.
For a simple model of how a typical immune response might work, think back to the last nasty bacterial infection you had. The little invading bugaboo that made you so ill had proteins all over its cell surface. The proper term for these foreign proteins is *antigens*. Your immune system, upon recognizing that these antigens were 'non- self' then attacked the little bugaboo with (among other things) another type of protein called an *antibody*. These antibodies are able to recognize the specific foreign antigen. They (the antibodies) attach to the foreign antigen, which eventually leads to the destruction of the little bugaboo that made you sick.
In terms of blood types, first note that our red blood cells have quite an array of proteins on their surface. The proteins we are concerned with here (and the ones by which we classify the most well- known of several blood group systems) are called the 'A, B, O' group of antigens. An individual who has the 'A' antigen on the surface of his/her blood cells is termed 'Type A'; likewise, an individual with the 'B' antigen on the surface of their blood cells is 'Type B'. If you should have inherited *both* the A and the B antigens from your parents, you are 'Type AB'. And if you have *neither* the A or B antigens on your blood cells, you are 'Type O'.
A funny thing about blood. . .within a few months of birth we automatically get antibodies in our blood plasma against whatever blood antigens we don't naturally have. That is, someone who is 'Type A' will automatically have antibodies against the B antigen. Individuals who are 'Type B' have antibodies against the A antigen. Someone who is 'Type O' (remember, Type O has neither the A or B antigens on their blood cells) really hits the jackpot--they have antibodies that can attack both the A and the B antigens.
Blood transfusions are an excellent way to illustrate this system (though discussing this topic causes my fangs to descend--I'll try to stay calm). Let us say that you are Type A (you have the A antigen on your red blood cells, and the B antibody in your plasma). Oops! You scored in the danger zone on the vamp vulnerability test, and some list-member has snacked upon you! You need a transfusion, quick! Not thinking terribly clearly from your loss of Type A blood, you stumble into the evil Dr. Nightingale's laboratory and beg for help. Unfortunately for you, Dr. Nightingale has terrible organizational skills, and has mislabeled a bag of Type B blood as Type A. . .and promptly infuses all of this Type B blood into your poor Type A body. The B antibodies in your plasma promptly start destroying all of the B blood cells that just got pumped into you (resulting in nasty things like blood clots going up to your already-befuddled brains). Worse still, since Dr. Nightingale gave you *whole blood* you have an additional problem: that bag of type B blood has A antibodies in the plasma, and those antibodies start attacking your native Type A red blood cells (more nastiness). Let us hope that your vampyric attacker transformed you, because at this point if you are not undead you are just plain dead.
It would seem that there are two possibilities for how a vampyre feeds. One would be that he/she simply drinks the blood after opening a blood vessel. This blood would simply be digested in his/her vampyric digestive tract, and whatever mystery substance in that blood that the vampyre needed would be extracted. The other possibility (and the one addressed in this section) is that the vampyre takes the victim's blood directly into his/her cardiovascular system.
Let me propose a model for a 'blood-sucking' type of vampyre and then relate that model to blood types. We will assume that species *Vampyrus sanguinosuctioni* has hollow fangs that connect into his/her venous system, and note that veins have quite low blood pressure (about 7 millimeters of mercury) as opposed to high-pressure arteries (mean pressures of around 100 millimeters of mercury). A vampyre as a predator should be quick, silent and deadly. . .after all, it probably isn't a good idea to linger over a kill for several hours while risking some busy-body named Van Helsing coming along. Thus, for a kill, *V. sanguinosuctioni* would drive these hollow fangs into the victim's high-pressure carotid artery.
The pressure difference between the victim's artery and the vampyre's venous system would cause most of the victim's blood supply to enter the vampyres vascular system with extreme rapidity (a few minutes would be all that was required). If the vampyre wished not to kill, but rather to make a new vampyre, he/she would simply change targets from the carotid artery to the jugular vein. Since pressures would be about equal, instead of 'emptying' the victim, the vampyre would simply allow a few minutes of gentle 'mixing' of their respective venous blood, thus 'infecting' the victim.
Relative to blood types, *V. sanguinosuctioni* would have some obvious problems to overcome. What if a Type A vampyre emptied a Type B victim? Unless some special mechanism is there to deal with this problem, our poor vampyre would end up like our late friend in the lab of Dr. Nightingale. I propose the following as one (of many possible) models for how the vampyre might get around the immune response problems:
A model of vampyrism where the vampyre simply drinks the victim's blood (*V. sanguinoslurpii*) into his/her digestive tract would eliminate (pardon the pun) any immune problems in feeding. However, this species of vampyre would probably suffer from chronic indigestion and heartburn. Another Malox Moment for poor *V. sanguinoslurpii*!
Fact and Theory on Sanguinarians
by Tattunigma
There have been and still are several misconceptions about the blood vampire, or
what is commonly referred to as a sanguinarian. Among those misconceptions
is the very popular belief that a blood vampire is an evil creature, demonlike
in it's endeavours to feed, and feeding for the purpose of evil's gain.
This is not true by any stretch of the imagination. All creatures must
feed in one form or another to survive. A blood vampire merely feeds
primarily on living blood to survive. Note the use of the word
"living". Let's focus on that for a moment, by researching what
the reasons are for the vampire's thirst for blood in the first place.
As nature has mutated a different "species" of human, or as I prefer
to say, an offshoot, certain nutritional requirements became evident. With
the mutation, or evolution as I believe it to be, differing aspects in human
characteristics have generated the need for different levels of nutritional
values. Each species is created, or evolved, to withstand the rigors of a
particular environmental setting. And in this way, vampires were born.
At some point in time, long ago, there must have been some need for the humans
in that area to evolve. Perhaps it was a lack of normal nutrition, solid
food sources, lack of vegetation, etc. that caused Nature to step in and help to
adapt these humans to living on alternative food. Blood. Readily
available from any other human, or animal, and full of the essentials needed for
survival. Vitamins, minerals, white blood cells, but most of all, liquid
energy. The legendary accounts of super strength and speed, enhanced
vision, hearing, etc; were all very much true, and in many cases, remain true to
this day, having been passed down from generation to generation. Vampires,
in common with other predators, had to be stronger, to suppress their prey, had
to be faster to catch it, and each and every sense had to be sharper, more like
an animals than a humans, thereby the enhanced hearing and sight. These
abilities are not supernatural, but rather, very natural indeed, and very
explainable.
A peculiar twist to the evolution comes in the form of the energy requirement.
As time went on, the need to actually hunt became less and less, what with the
advent of willing donors. Slowly, the need for proteins and vitamins in
the blood lessened with the onslaught of the need for energy, in order to keep
the high maintenance body alive. Energy was now the prime nourishment
extracted from blood, although, as with any species, there remained a select
few, through breeding, who retained the need for blood as sustenance as well,
and these, irrefutably tend to be the purer form of vampire, a true sanguinarian.
Those who feed on blood as a source of energy, have migrated back to solid foods
for their nourishment, and while they seem to retain some of the physical
strengths and enhancements, they are not for the most part, as strong as their
predecessors. However, many of these have adapted many new
characteristics, like mild telepathy, enhanced mental attributes, probably due
to the overflow of naturally occurring energies.
It is interesting to note, that many of these "lesser" sanquinarians,
for lack of a better word, do at times continue in their evolution to becoming
complete sanguinarians, they grow and mature to this level. This is not
however, to say that all of them do. Throughout time, there have been
accounts of vampires, in every culture in the world, all with the same basic
characteristics, yet with subtle differences. And those differences were
quite simply, the results of the purity of their particular bloodlines, denoting
at birth their strengths as a vampire, if they carried the genes at all.
Too much pure human DNA has without doubt diluted many bloodlines, and many it
has not.
This explains the different levels of sanguinarian vampirism as seen by this
vampires eyes, through hours and hours of not only personal, but other's
research efforts as well.
An Essay on Vampire Biology
by Fanglady
Before speculating on any specific pathogens capable of producing a condition
akin to vampirism wish to post an old line of reasoning on how vampires manage
to survive on a diet which contains so much water and so little else.
Speculation on the subject of the dietary requirements of vampires must first
deal with what the blood is actually being used for. Some fiction, including
Elrod's novels, seems to assume that it is for circulatory purposes. I am
inclined to doubt this, in view of the general agreement that those who walk by
night need not breathe. If the lungs are not being ventilated, the purpose of
blood circulation to the tissues seems questionable at best.
Assuming that blood is being digested seems much more reasonable. It raises,
however, energetic issues. Blood is an awkward material to make a living from.
Vampire bats do this, but they have very little safety margin. A bat that cannot
feed on one night stands a strong chance of starving to death before the next
night. They also consume large fluid volumes relative to their own body size.
Assuming first a digestive system operating after the pattern of living animals,
breaking down complex organic molecules to carbon dioxide and water, one can do
an interesting theoretical investigation of the energy balances involved.
The recommended daily minimum caloric intake for a young adult male is asserted
by the relevant government agencies to be in the neighborhood of 2800
nutritionists calories (kcals to a physicist or biologist) per day. This is
alleged to be sufficient for minimal maintenance, not heavy labor. Like most
such figures, the adult in question is assumed to be the stereotypical 70
kilograms, North American.
A mammal digesting protein obtains about 4.8 kcals from one gram (dry weight!)
of protein. The constituents of blood are almost entirely proteinaceous, so it
is convenient to use this value. To obtain 2800 kcals, then, necessitates the
consumption of 583 grams dry protein per day.
I have been unable to obtain a lumped value for the total dry matter present in
a given volume of mammalian blood, but a convenient reference tome (Altman and
Dittmer; Biology Data Book) asserts that the concentration of hemoglobin in
human blood is 150 dry grams per litre. Yes, litre. Because human blood cells do
not accomplish much except hemoglobin packaging, it is not unreasonable to take
the 150 g per litre figure as the total protein content.
The previous two paragraphs imply, then, that 583/150 =3.9 liters of blood are
required to meet human-level metabolic requirements.
I have a considerable distaste, for the above calculation. At most generous
estimate, a second and indubitably human adult will have a total blood volume
approximating 10% of his body weight .. let us say seven kilograms. Seven litres,
then. Mammals cannot survive the catastrophic loss of more than about 30-40
percent of their total blood volume, that being a maximum of 2.8 liters from the
above 7 liter scenario. The loss of 20% of blood volume is almost invariably
survivable, meaning that a loss of 1.4 litres would not be fatal, though the
impact would be substantial and unpleasant. All this suggest that IF mammalian
energetic constrain the obligately nocturnal readers of this list, they must be
feeding on three people a night. (The annual number of unsolved murders in the
country, high as it is, is not high enough to support the obvious possibility.)
A more reasonable (but not, I think, the most pleasing) suggestion would be that
the energetic model to examine is not that of mammals, but of reptiles. The
profligate habit of maintaining an elevated body temperature imposes a
tremendous cost on those of us silly enough to do so. As a very rough
approximation, a reptile has energy demands one tenth those of a bird or mammal
of the same body size. This certainly brings the dietary requirements back to a
more manageable level.
The shortcomings of this outlook are, of course, the same as the shortcomings of
reptiles. Chemical reactions, including biochemical ones, proceed much more
slowly at low temperatures. If the masters of the night are thus constrained,
any of them trying to survive at high altitudes have a problem. They had best be
exceedingly stealthy, for they couldn't outrun a toddler at 35 degrees
Fahrenheit. Given the abundance of vampire legends from northern countries, this
limitation seems unlikely. I do acknowledge the fondness of Ricean vampires for
southerly climates, but they do not seem to suffer in extreme cold.
Both the mammalian and reptilian models suffer also from the fundamental
assumptions arising from the metabolism of living cells. Neither mammals nor
reptiles function in the absence of oxygen (and I need not be reminded about
hibernating turtles - turtles cheat). Yet a near-universal agreement seems to
hold: the undead need not breathe. We are not discussing organisms small enough
to make simple diffusion a viable option, so I don't believe that any energetic
system which demands oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor will suffice to
explain the phenomenon.
Yet there is, perhaps, a better way. What of a much more fundamental energetic
option?
Energy (in joules) = mass (in kilograms) * 2.997 exp 8 m/sYsquared ..
One gram of material, regardless of water content, yields
8.98x10-to-the-thirteenth joules of energy. This works out to about
2x10-to-the-tenth kcals. Obviously, only a minute fraction of the blood is used
for this purpose, or the problem would be one of disposing of energy rather than
acquiring it. If this suggestion has any validity, most of the ingested material
must be used for structural maintenance and repair of the body, or excreted in
some manner. I am inclined to suggest gaseous loss, primarily in the form of
carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen.
I will not propose a mechanism for this, as no living animal has yet worked out
a way to pull it off at bio-compatible temperatures. Clearly, though, this out
to be a matter of great interest to the cold-fusion crowd.
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Summary
A human-size organism functioning like a mammal needs to feed heavily and
frequently for even minimal survival on blood.
A human-sized organism functioning like a reptile would get by energetically, at
the cost of putting up with typical reptilian shortcomings.
Direct conversion of matter to energy (E=mc52) would resolve these problems
handily.
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The point of all this is not to pretend that the hunters of the night cannot
exist - blatant folly in view of the number of them reading this - but to
suggest that the biology of magic is a largely unexplored field.
As with more mundane human pathogens, the first major issue in addressing this
problem is the establishment of a model system suitable for investigation. Thus
I have a query for the, shall we say, more senior readers of this list .. Is
your condition transmissible to small rodents, and if so, what containment
procedures are sufficient to manage them? Vampiric rats might present certain
unusual hazards for university animal maintenance personnel.
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The overall problem of approaching vampirism biologically, as this
possibly-myopic entity perceives it, is that of finding an invader capable of
rebuilding its human host to do one of two things. It must either produce more
energy from limited materials than living organisms can manage by chemical means
(the cold fusion suggestion) or it must conserve energy so dramatically --
without compromising the strength and speed associated with the condition --
that the scant energy available from blood will suffice.
These problems invite speculation that something other than a living vampiric
disease/parasite is involved. Time permitting, and if the net humors a pedantic
peccary's speculations, I'll expound on the possible perter-biological
underpinnings of contagious vampirism (referred to in "Night Out" as
metabolic aberration) in a later post.
Animal Blood- Safety of Pig vs. Cow blood by Orb
Though the possibility of becoming ill from Pork blood is small, why risk it at all? It has nothing to do with pathogens, but instead with parasites.Trichinosis is a gastrointestinal illness caused by the intestinal roundworm, Trichinella spiralis. Trichinosis is prevented by cooking all pork and pork products at a temperature and for a sufficient amount of time to allow all parts to reach 71° C.
The eggs of this parasite can be found in a certain percentage of all pigs raised for dietary uses ... which is why everyone always tells you to be certain to cook pork thoroughly before eating. It can also be found in the blood of the animal. Unfortunately, heating the blood to the suggested 71° C essentially destroys it, as far as it being "fresh" any longer, though you can make a nice blood pudding from it (I hear, I don't do cooked blood).
In the infective stages, trichinosis causes intestinal ailments, nausea, vomiting, and watery stools. Later symptoms are facial swelling, headache, and delirium. Some people recovering from trichinosis suffer permanent heart or eye damage, and about 5 percent of cases are fatal. Trichinosis may be successfully treated with drugs before the blood migration phase (which is when the parasite eggs enter the blood stream of the host before attaching themselves to muscle fibers and forming cysts), but it is difficult to diagnose in the early stages. This disease is difficult to see in dietary pigs, and therefore a good deal of pork is sold that is infected. If you buy blood from a butcher, your chances of getting infected blood are higher, as it does not come from a major plant with FDA inspectors on site. The inspection system for small butcher shops is significantly different from that of major plants (more lax). Therefore, anytime you purchase ANY meat or blood product from a butcher you take a risk of some sort. Good reason to know your butcher well.
Beef blood is significantly safer as there are very few diseases or parasites that can be exchanged between humans and cows (mad cow disease being the only one I know of really - it being of little consequence here in the US).
Besides, I happen to like the taste of beef blood better than
pig anyway.