Contagion

It's been a long time since the tragedy at The Facility, where so many people lost their lives during the clinical trials for Tapeworm Slim. Now the revolutionary medication of Doctor Sahara Scarseed is on sale across every major retailer in the high street, used by over four million people and has decimated her competitors in the diet market. But is there something wrong with the capsules? Many Tapeworm Slim users are becoming infirm with a gastric malady... Scarseed's social networking site, Ratergram, is also surpassing its online rivals and has created an epidemic of teenage celebrity, eating disorders and bled a fetid exploitation into the weight loss phenomenon. Yet there is a darker side to Ratergram... A predator stalks its chatrooms... A serial killer who is grooming and eating the young children who are addicted to the website. There has also been a general election and, after a landslide victory by the Conservative Party, a charismatic new Prime Minister called Dante Mackerton is about to unveil his radical new legislation of NHS privatisation, economic reform and scything austerity cuts. With these avaricious decrements already affecting overstretched nurses, such as the young Blitzen Wilcox of the Queen Victoria Hospital, the plague of physical and mental health problems amongst Tapeworm Slim consumers is now a resource crippling scourge. Not that any of this is the concern of Mackerton, as he is busy romancing multinational syndicates for his own financial and political gain, including Scarseed's own Vicovex Corporation, and he has no idea of the catastrophic pandemic which is about to sweep across the United Kingdom...