bomb goes off and destroys the office. Mitsuyama sends Hideki Katsamura on a tour of the United States as the company launches its water filters. Throughout the journey, Katsamura is afflicted with diarrhea. He winds up being patient zero for an outbreak of acute enteritis that ravages the country. It is left unstated whether it was an intentional poisoning to increase water filter sales. May The enteritis epidemic hits America hard, and 35 million people become infected. Many are unable to work; businesses are forced to run on skeleton crews; and public services such as police, mass transit, and garbage collection are severely disrupted. At the wat, it is discovered that Felice's worms included Jigras, which ruin the vegetable crop. The Jigras begin spreading across the nation, which results in a dire food shortage. Jacob publicly swears to destroy his Nutripon inventory in a public relations exercise. Hugh and Carl, having left the wat and wanting to take more serious action for the environment, meet a man calling himself Austin Train, one of many imposters. June Michael arrives in Colorado to oversee the destruction of the Nutripon stocks. He meets some young people who want to eat what they think is poisoned food since they want to go insane. Michael tells them that the food is clean, and when he tries to give some to prove it, he is arrested, and a riot breaks out. The army uses laser cannons, and 63 people die in the fighting, Michael included. Peg meets with Lucy and a man named Fernando Arriegas to discuss the Noshri incident. At gunpoint, they force Peg to eat contaminated Nutripon. She winds up tripping out, and mysterious men enter the hotel room and kill Lucy and Fernando. Thorne meets Professor Quarrey and his wife to discuss whether he has a case against the state department for his wife's death. The conversation goes into Puritan Foods, a company claiming to sell uncontaminated food and is tied to an organized crime group called The Syndicate, but after careful analysis, Quarrey has found that Puritan is no better than regular food and that some of it must come from outside of North America, as the continent has too little uncontaminated farmland to grow all the food that it sells. They also discuss how the Jigras entered the United States. A worm importer in Texas passed them off as regular worms,