Zookeepers call it the crab-eating macaque. It is a common monkey that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia, and it is often used as a laboratory animal.
It eats fruit, crabs, insects, and small pieces of clay. A crab-eating macaque will snatch a crab out of the water and quickly rip its claws off and throw them away before devouring the rest of the crab. The crab-eating macaque has brown eyes, pointed ears, tawny fur, and a long tail. The Philippine monkeys arrived at J. The monkeys were kept in stainless-steel cages in windowless rooms, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits. By the first of November, twenty-seven monkeys had died.
That was more than usual for a shipment of wild monkeys. Dan Dalgard performed necropsies on the ones that had died, and concluded that they were being killed by dysentery and pneumonia. These diseases are not uncommon in wild monkeys. A week later, on Monday, November 6th, another shipment of crab-eating macaques arrived, making a total of about five hundred monkeys in the quarantine unit, all crab-eating macaques from the Philippines.
But by November 10th Dalgard had begun to suspect that some of his monkeys might be dying of simian hemorrhagic fever, or S. The possibility worried Dalgard, because S. He began sacrificing monkeys that appeared sick, by injecting them with overdoses of an anesthetic, and then he opened them up.
He found that their spleens were enlarged—a classic sign of simian hemorrhagic fever. But monkeys infected with S.
The monkeys had simply stopped eating and died of shock. The focus of the infection was Room F, where most of the monkeys had perished. The disease gave Dalgard an eerie feeling, and prompted him to keep a diary. Of the monkeys that had died in Room F he wrote:. Many of the animals were in prime condition and had more abdominal and subcutaneous fat than is customary for animals arriving from the wild.
The diagnosis at this time was continuing to point more strongly toward S. He described to Jahrling the illness that was burning through his monkeys, and he sent some blood and tissue samples to Jahrling. Some of the samples came from a monkey known as O53, which had lived in Room F. Jahrling froze some of the tissues and placed them in a Biosafety Level 3 containment room. One way to identify a virus is to make it multiply inside living cells in a flask.
You drop a very small sample of the virus into the cells, and as the virus spreads through the cells extraordinary numbers of virus particles are produced. You can then look at them under a microscope, or you can put different kinds of fluorescent antibodies—immunity proteins—in the virus culture.
These antibodies attach themselves to infected cells and glow under ultraviolet light, and the antibody that makes cells glow tells you which particular virus you have in the flask.
A civilian technician named Joan Rhoderick cultured the unknown monkey virus from the liver of Monkey O She ground up a bit of the liver with a mortar and pestle, and dropped some of the resultant mush into flasks that contained a living strain of cells from the kidney of a green monkey. Joan Rhoderick wore a surgical mask and rubber gloves but not a space suit, and she worked with the samples kept in a safety cabinet that pulls air away from the samples and through a filter.
John Rhoderick and Peter Jahrling looked at slices of liver and spleen from Monkey O53, and Jahrling gave a presumptive diagnosis of simian hemorrhagic fever to Dan Dalgard. At this point, Dalgard felt that he had no choice but to sacrifice all the monkeys in Room F in order to halt the spreading disease.
If those monkeys were infected with S. Dalgard and an assistant, wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves, euthanized all the monkeys in Room F on November 16th—some seventy monkeys in all. They gave the monkeys injections of an anesthetic. Dalgard opened ten of the corpses to see what he could see, and sent everything to an incinerator. His specialty is the electron microscope.
Geisbert is something of a loner, a tall man with blue eyes, brown hair, and arrestingly large ears. He grew up an only child in western Maryland, where he spent a lot of time camping in the woods alone or with his uncles, who taught him how to hunt and fish.
Tom Geisbert goes deer hunting in West Virginia every year around Thanksgiving. He planned to leave on Monday morning of that week, but something prompted him to stop by his lab at USAMRIID for a last look at the flasks of monkey cells that were incubating the virus from Reston. At nine in the morning, he put on a surgical mask and gloves and entered the BL-3 suite. There he met Joan Rhoderick, the technician who had started the Reston culture.
She was looking at a flask under a microscope. The flask contained cells infected with virus from the Reston monkey O The flask was small—four inches long—and it was made of plastic and had a screw cap.
Geisbert looked through the eyepieces of the microscope into the flask. Living cells ordinarily cling to the bottom of a flask in a carpet. This carpet looked eaten by moths. It was full of holes: dead and dying cells had detached from the flask and drifted into the fluid. They were rounded and had a granular, pepperlike look. Some were dead. It means they had floated away. He went out and got Peter Jahrling, his boss. He thought that a wild strain of bacteria had invaded the cell culture.
This is a common and annoying occurrence in cell cultures, and it wipes out the culture. Bacteria give off odors as they multiply, and Peter Jahrling had smelled enough bacterial contaminations so that he knew how to distinguish them by nose.
Viruses, on the other hand, kill cells without releasing an odor. There was no odor. No smell. But the cells were blown away. Geisbert poured some milky fluid out of the flask into a test tube and spun it in a microcentrifuge. Geisbert removed the button with a wooden stick and soaked it in plastic resin. Then he went hunting in West Virginia. He planned to look at the button in his microscope when he returned, after Thanksgiving.
When Ebola virus infects a human being, the incubation period is from seven to fourteen days, while the number of virus particles gradually climbs in the bloodstream. Then comes the headache. The first known emergence of a filovirus happened in August, , in Marburg, Germany.
A shipment of green monkeys from Uganda had arrived in Frankfurt. Green-monkey kidney cells are useful for the production of vaccines, and these monkeys were going to be killed for their kidneys.
Most of the monkeys were trucked from Frankfurt to a factory in Marburg that produced serum and vaccines, while a few monkeys from the same shipment stayed in Frankfurt, and a few others went to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The first person known to be infected with the virus—the index case—was a man known as Klaus F.
He broke with fever and rash on August 8th, and died two weeks later. Martini and R. In it we learn:. The monkey-keeper heinrich p. The first symptoms appeared on August 21st.
The laboratory assistant renate l. And so on. Thirty-one laboratory workers acquired the disease; seven died. In other words, the case-fatality rate of Marburg virus in hospitalized patients was twenty-two per cent. That was terrifying. Yellow fever, which is considered a lethal virus, kills only five per cent of the infected once they reach a hospital.
Marburg began with a splitting headache, focussed behind the eyes and temples. That was followed by a fever. The characteristic diagnostic sign was a red speckled rash over the body which blistered into a sea of tiny white bubbles. The patient Hans O. At autopsy, his brain was found to be laced with hemorrhages, and there was a massive, fatal hemorrhage at the center. In Frankfurt, an animal attendant known as B. He was given whole-blood transfusions, but then he developed uncontrollable hemorrhages at the sites of the I.
He died with blood running from his mouth and his nipples. All the survivors lost their hair. During convalescence, the skin peeled off their faces, hands, feet, and genitals.
It was a small, frightening emergence. Marburg virus looks like rope, or it rolls up into the rings that resemble Cheerios. They thought that it might be a type of rabies. The rabies particle is shaped like a bullet, and if you stretch a bullet it becomes a rod, and the rod can be bent into a doughnut: Marburg.
In what animal or insect does Marburg hide? Marburg evidently does not circulate in monkeys. The Marburg monkeys had been collected in Uganda by native trappers—apparently in forested habitat to the west of Mt. Elgon, an extinct volcano that straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya.
Teams of epidemiologists combed Uganda, and especially the western slopes of Mt. Elgon, looking for some animal or insect that harbored Marburg virus; they found nothing. Elgon developed Marburg and died. He was an amateur naturalist who spent time camping and hiking around Mt. Elgon, and he had recently visited a cavern on the Kenyan side of the mountain which was known as Kitum Cave.
Then, in the late summer of , a Danish boy whose name will be given here as Peter Cardinal visited the Kenyan side of Mt. Elgon with his parents—the Cardinals were tourists—and the boy broke with Marburg and died.
The result was weird. The paths of the French engineer and the Danish boy had crossed only once—in Kitum Cave. Peter Cardinal had gone inside Kitum Cave. As for the Ugandan trappers who had collected the original Marburg monkeys, they might have poached them from the Kenyan side of Mt.
Those monkeys might have lived near Kitum Cave, and might even have occasionally visited the cave. Elgon is a huge, eroded volcanic massif, fifty miles across—one of the largest volcanoes in East Africa. Kitum Cave is one of a number of caverns that penetrate Mt. Elgon at an altitude of around eight thousand feet and open their mouths in a deep forest of podo trees, African junipers, African olives, and camphors.
Kitum Cave descends into tight passages and underground pools that extend an unknown distance back into Mt. The volcanic rock within Kitum Cave is permeated with mineral salts. Elephants go inside the cave to root out chunks of salty rock with their tusks and chew on them. Water buffalo also visit the cave to lick the rocks, and they may be followed into the cave by leopards.
Fruit bats and insect-eating bats roost in the cave, filling the air with a sour smell. The animals drop their dung in the cave—an enclosed airspace—and they attract biting flies and carry ticks and mites. The volcanic rock contains petrified logs, the remains of trees that were enveloped in lava, and the logs are filled with sharp crystals. Peter Cardinal may have handled crystals inside the cave and scratched his hands. Possibly the crystals were tainted with animal urine or the remains of an insect.
It kills guinea pigs like flies. The team wore Racal suits inside the cave. A Racal is a lightweight pressurized suit with a filtered air supply, used for hot operations in the field. There is no vaccine for Marburg, and the Army people had come to believe that the virus could be spread through the air.
The guinea pigs and monkeys were sentinel animals, like canaries in a coal mine: they were placed there in the theory or the hope that some of them would develop Marburg. With the help of Kenyan naturalists, the Army team trapped as many different kinds of wild mammals as they could find, including rodents, rock hyraxes, and bats, and drew blood from them.
They collected insects. Some local people, the il-Kony, had lived in some of the caves. A Kenyan doctor from the Kenya Medical Research Institute, in Nairobi, drew blood from these people and took their medical histories. At the far end of Kitum Cave, where it disappears in pools of water, the Army team found a population of sand flies. They mashed some flies and tested them for Marburg. The expedition was a dry hole. The sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the mammals, insects, arthropods, and local people showed no obvious signs of Marburg.
To this day, the natural reservoir of Marburg is unknown. Marburg lives somewhere in the shadow of Mt. On July 6, , five hundred miles northwest of Mt. Elgon, in the township of Nzara, Sudan, in densely wooded country at the edge of the African rain forest, a man referred to as YuG died of a hemorrhagic fever. He was a storekeeper in a cotton factory, and he was the index case of a new strain of filovirus.
The clinical features of the disease were indistinguishable from those of Marburg—masklike facial expression, rash, bleeding, terminal shock. No one knows how the virus got into the cotton factory. One of the dead men, a man known as PG, had a wide circle of friends and contacts, and he also had several mistresses. Most of the subsequent fatal cases of what later came to be known as the Sudan subtype of Ebola hemorrhagic fever can be traced back through chains of infection to PG, through as many as six generations of infection.
The strain burned through the town of Nzara, and then reached eastward to the town of Maridi, where there was a large hospital, and it hit the hospital like a bomb. A characteristic of a lethal, highly transmissible, and incurable virus is that it kills medical people first. Frequently, as in this case, the medical-care system actually intensifies the outbreak, like a lens that focusses sunlight in a heap of tinder.
The Sudan virus was more than twice as lethal as Marburg—its case-fatality rate was fifty per cent, the same as that of bubonic plague before antibiotics. And the death rate kept climbing, until by the third month of the Sudan outbreak mortality among the infected had hit seventy per cent, as if perhaps the virus were mutating, getting hotter as it passed from generation to generation in humans.
The surviving staff of the Maridi hospital had panicked and run away, and that may have helped break the chain of infection. Or possibly the human hosts died too quickly to be efficient transmitters of the virus. Whatever the reason, the organism vanished. In early September, , two months after the beginning of the Sudan break, a similar yet more lethal strain emerged five hundred miles to the west, in the Bumba Zone of Zaire, an area of humid rain forest drained by the Ebola River.
The Ebola River strain seemed to come out of nowhere, and popped up in the Yambuku Mission Hospital, an upcountry clinic run by Belgian nuns. The staff sometimes rinsed the needles in a pan of warm water between injections.
The virus entered the cycle of dirty needles, and erupted in fifty-five villages around the hospital. It first killed people who had received injections, and then killed family members—particularly women, who in Africa prepare the dead for burial.
Medical people go first. By the end of September, two-thirds of the staff were dead or dying, and the hospital closed down. A critically ill Belgian nun who was a nurse at the hospital, Sister M. Sister M. Sister E. Then a Zairian nurse at Ngaliema Hospital, identified as M.
She had cared for Sister M. While M. The virus seemed about to start an explosive chain of lethal transmission in Kinshasa, a poor, crowded city with a population of two million, where the virus might go off like a bonfire. This epidemiological possibility triggered a panic in European capitals. Kinshasa has direct air links to Europe, and European governments contemplated blocking flights from Kinshasa.
The World Health Organization feared that the nurse M. The Zairian government ordered its army to seal off the Bumba Zone with roadblocks, and all radio contact with the province was lost. Bumba had dropped off the earth, into the silent heart of darkness. Out of Bumba came some tubes of blood, and from Sudan came some vials of serum. Johnson isolated the Ebola River virus for the first time. Key members of the team were Frederick A.
Murphy, who is an expert in the electron microscope, and Patricia A. Webb, a virologist. She was married to Karl Johnson at the time. The team started to grow the virus in cultures of monkey cells, and Murphy began looking at the cells in his microscope.
Therefore it was a new virus. Karl Johnson and his team had performed what is known as the first isolation and characterization of the agent—they had got it to replicate, and they had proved it was something new. They named it Ebola. I learned that Johnson could be reached at a fax number in Big Sky, Montana, so I sent him a fax, in which I said that Ebola virus fascinated me.
My fax machine emitted this reply:. How about shit scared? The richest trout river in America may be the Bighorn, a green, muscular river in Montana that flows out of the Bighorn Mountains into grassland, and is lined with cottonwoods. One recent day in October, the brown trout were spawning in the Bighorn, and the cottonwoods had turned yellow and rattled in a south wind.
Standing waist-deep in a mutableslick of the river, wearing sunglasses, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a fly rod in his hand, Karl Johnson ripped his line off the water and laid a cast upstream. Johnson is a great figure in the history of virology; he trained an entire generation of field virologists at a tropical laboratory called MARU, which he ran in Panama.
He studied the water, took a step downstream, and whipped another cast. There was no news coming out of Bumba province, no radiocontact. We knew it was bad in there, and we knew we were dealing with something new. If Ebola had easily spread through the air, the world would be a very different place today. It would have been exceedingly difficult to contain that virus if it had had any major respiratory component.
In , I led the investigation of the Machupo outbreak, named for a river that runs by a little town in the plains of eastern Bolivia. Same kind of thing. People bleeding and dying.
Karl Johnson performed the first isolation of the Machupo virus, a deadly emerger that belongs to a family known as the arenaviruses, because the virus particles are speckled with dots that look like sand. Johnson also collaborated on the first isolation of the Hantaan virus, a lethal east-Asian organism classified as a BL-3 agent , which happens to be another important emerger. A Hantaan relative now infects the rats of Baltimore and Philadelphia; no obvious human epidemic has yet occurred in the United States.
Johnson has therefore been credited with work that led to the discovery and classification of three major groups of emerging human hemorrhagic-fever viruses—the filoviruses, the arenaviruses, and the hantaviruses named after Hantaan. He admitted he was too afraid. We sent him home. It was better to be working at the epicenter than to get the infection at the London opera.
The W. They set up two containment pavilions at Ngaliema Hospital. Into one pavilion they shut thirty-seven people who had had face-to-face contact with M. Doctors and nurses entered the containment areas through a double-doored antechamber, a gray zone. They wrapped the cadavers of the nuns and the nurse when she died in sheets soaked in a phenolic disinfectant, then double-bagged these mummies in plastic, put them in coffins that had screw-down lids, and issued instructions to the families of the deceased to bury the coffins immediately, with no wake.
The rooms where the nuns had suffered their agonals were not pleasant to behold. The floors, furniture, and walls were stained with blood. The aspect of those rooms may have raised in some minds one or two questions about the nature of the Supreme Being; or, for persons not inclined to theology, the blood on the walls may have served as a reminder of the nature of Nature. No one in the containment pavilions or in the city fell ill with the virus. It turned out that the epidemic was already in decline when the teams got there.
The village elders had had the wisdom to institute procedures for dealing with smallpox, which has been a problem for centuries in Africa. An infected person was put in a hut by himself, and food and water were pushed through the doorway. It really worked with Ebola.
But think what that does to a traditional culture. In order to stop an epidemic that way, you have to suspend all the normal cultural relations that surround death. You have to put a parent or a child into that hut and burn it down afterward. Nancy had grown up on a farm in Wichita. They lived on a farm outside town, where they grew truck crops, such as tomatoes, cantaloupes, peppers, watermelons, and corn, for the restaurants. Nancy would get up at five in the morning to work in the fields with her father.
Thanksgiving of was the most painful family reunion of her life. She said her farewell to her father. Tom Geisbert shot a buck in West Virginia, and returned home to spend Thanksgiving with his family.
Dan Dalgard spent an uneasy Thanksgiving with his wife. He had not stopped the apparent course of simian hemorrhagic fever in his monkeys by sacrificing the monkeys in Room F. Dead monkeys appeared in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F. After the holiday weekend, Dalgard performed necropsies on four monkeys, taking slices of spleen, liver, and kidney.
He wanted to get an early start with his electron microscope, looking at the button of dead cells he had harvested the previous Monday. Recently, I met with Geisbert in his office. The walls were plastered with photographs of the Ebola virus. Some of the viruses were ten inches long and resembled ballpark frankfurters.
I asked him how he takes a photograph of a virus. He unlocked a filing cabinet and removed from it a metal object the size of a pocket pencil sharpener.
See the diamond? A prism gleamed. Four thousand dollars. He showed me a button of cells. It was a dot the size of a toast crumb, embedded in a wedge of clear plastic. He took the button into another room, where he mounted the button and the diamond knife in a machine and threw a switch.
The machine worked like a deli slicer. It drew the diamond knife across the button, peeling off a slice, just like a slice of luncheon meat. The slice was this size:. It contained as many as ten thousand cells. Geisbert picked up the slice with a tiny copper mesh, and carried the sample into a darkened room containing a metal tower taller than a person.
That was his microscope. He put the sample in a chamber in the microscope, and pushed a button. A complicated image appeared on a viewing screen, showing a tiny corner of one cell—a cellscape of oxbow rivers and lakes that reminded me of an aerial view of jungle.
We huddled over the viewing screen, and lakes and paths and specks went by almost without end, until I felt as if we were inside a starship, making a low-orbit pass over a huge, unexplored planet near Tau Ceti. He was immutably patient, his eyes scanning the terrain. He could pick out patterns of sickness in a cell, subtle anomalies which, like footprints, would lead him to the horrible brood.
In the case of Ebola, it is a brood. When Ebola replicates, the virus grows in blocks inside a cell, which are like nests. These are the inclusion bodies, or bricks. The bricks migrate toward the surface of the cell. As a brick reaches the cell wall, it disintegrates into hundreds of individual viruses, and the broodlings bud through the cell membrane and float away in the universe of the host.
No one knows how the Ebola bricks are propelled toward the surface of the cell. His face glowed in the light of the screen. The sample is cell culture from Monkey O I put the sample in the scope. I switch it on. Elgon—and I knew what that looked like. So I thought, Marburg. I knew that Pete Jahrling and I had sniffed those flasks. He developed a few photographs of the virus particles and hurried into the office of Peter Jahrling, his boss.
Jahrling reacted calmly. It seemed to be a filovirus—Jahrling could see wormlike shapes. Jahrling and Geisbert could have breathed it into their lungs. They began counting days back to the time of their exposure. Seven days had passed since they inhaled from the flask. Peters feared that any public announcement of a Marburg-virus outbreak might cause a panic in Reston, once people had learned the history of Marburg.
He wanted to get a definite positive identification of the strain before the Army made any announcement. Tom Geisbert stayed up most of that night. He went into the BL-3 laboratory and found a plastic jug that contained sterilized pieces of liver from Monkey O He fished some liver out of the jug, clipped bits off it, and fixed the bits in plastic, preparatory to slicing them for viewing in his electron microscope.
He left the plastic to cure and went home for a couple of hours to try to sleep. It was a definite confirmation that the Reston monkeys were infected with a filovirus.
He also establishes procedures for the monkey house in Reston that keeps the soldiers who are trying to decontaminate the location safe. Lori Garrett-Hatfield has a B. She has a Ph. She has been working in the Education field since , and has taught every grade level in the K system, specializing in English education, and English as a Second Language education.
Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language.
See disclaimer. Peter Jahrling Gene Johnson. Peter Jahrling. Related Articles. A day Part 2, Chapter 3: Exposure. The two decide to show the cells to Peter Jahrling. When he sees the sample, Jahrling asserts that the cells must have been contaminated in some way—an annoying but common occurrence Part 2, Chapter 4: Thanksgiving. Dan Dalgard, meanwhile, calls Peter Jahrling to find out further information about the virus.
Jahrling tells him once again that it Part 2, Chapter 5: Medusa. Part 2, Chapter 6: The First Angel. On the way, he passes the chaotic office of Gene Johnson, before Jahrling finds Peters in a meeting, but upon seeing the pictures, the colonel instantly leaves the After speaking to C.
Peters, Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert discuss the fact that they both may have inhaled Marburg virus. Jahrling asserts that he and Geisbert most likely did not contract the virus, although he decides Part 2, Chapter 7: The Second Angel.
He takes his photographs to Peter Jahrling and C. Peters, and the three men now must wait for Jahrling to complete As he works on his tests, Peter Jahrling decides that he must notify Dan Dalgard—but at the same time, he must make sure As he does, he wonders whether any of his employees have cut themselves with scalpels As Dan Dalgard waits and worries, Peter Jahrling works in his spacesuit. He plans to combine samples of the virus with the blood Part 2, Chapter 8: Chain of Command.
Unable to believe that the strain is Ebola Zaire, Peter Jahrling performs the test again, but gets the same results. He is positive now that the Peter Jahrling and C.
Part 2, Chapter Shoot-Out. He also has a longstanding rivalry with Peters. The meeting begins with Peter Jahrling explaining that there is a strain of Ebola infecting the monkeys. Next a nervous Dalgard
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