The Hot Zone: Part Three

A task force of top-level state and federal experts on contagious diseases spent much of yesterday devising a detailed program to trace the path of the rare Ebola virus and who might have been exposed to it.

C. J. was understating the gravity of the situation.

At the moment, he didn’t care what happened to himself, personally. He was expendable, and he knew it.

He switched on his electric blower, and his suit puffed up around him. It didn’t feel too bad, but it made him sweat profusely.

They were standing in a windowless, lightless, cinder-block corridor that had doors at either end: this was the makeshift air lock, the gray zone.

They opened it and found themselves standing at the junction of two corridors, bathed in a cacophony of monkey cries.

Some of the monkeys went berserk when they saw the space suits.

You fitted a syringe into the socket, and you slid the pole into the cage and gave the monkey a shot.

Once a monkey was down, Jerry gave it a shot of a sedative called Rompun, which put it into a deep sleep.

When all the monkeys were down and asleep, they set up a couple of stainless-steel tables, and then, one monkey at a time, they took blood samples from the unconscious monkeys and gave them a third injection, this time of a lethal drug called T-61, which is a euthanasia agent.

When they had suited up and gone in, there had been five monkey carcasses waiting for them in the air lock.

The intestine was blitzed, completely full of uncoagulated, runny blood, and at the same time the monkey had had massive blood clotting in the intestinal muscles.

Some of the monkeys were so badly liquefied that she and Trotter didn’t even bother to do a necropsy, they just yanked samples of liver and spleen from the dead animal.

the monkey facility had to be evacuated.

The C.D.C. people had arrived at Hazleton to begin surveillance of all employees who had been exposed to the virus.

The air temperature in the building had soared beyond ninety degrees, and the place had turned steamy, odorous, alive with monkey calls.

Here and there, in rooms all over the building, some of the animals stared from glazed eyes in masklike faces, and some of them had blood running from their orifices.

He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how he or his people would perform in a chaotic situation involving intense fear of an unpleasant death.

The Army’s animal-care technicians are classified 91-T, which in Army jargon becomes 91-Tango.

The walls were scribbled all the way up to the ceiling with monkey writing. It was a cryptic message to the human race that came out of the primate soul.

The livers of these animals were gray, eroded, nasty looking.

He didn’t want the cameras to start rolling just as two women in space suits were extracted from the building.

That was where they found the needles—two used hypodermic syringes with needles attached to them.

As the day wore on, you could see exhausted soldiers and civilians in orange space suits, men and women, their head bubbles clouded with condensation, sitting on the chairs in the hallway, loading syringes with T-61 and sorting boxes full of blood tubes.

The events that followed have a dreamlike quality in people’s memories, and the memories are contradictory.

If you tried to shoot the monkey, you’d be firing into the cages, and the bullet could hit a cage or a wall and might ricochet inside the room.

He let his eyes adjust to the darkness, and had the usual struggle to see anything in the microscope through his faceplate. Then the panorama swam into view.

Their father was in cardiac failure, and the doctor had been asking if the family wanted him to undertake extreme lifesaving measures.

She felt that she couldn’t leave her job in the middle of the Reston crisis, that it would be a dereliction of her post.

At various places inside the monkey house, they set out patches of paper saturated with spores of a harmless bacterium known as Bacillus subtilis niger.

Total, unequivocal sterilization is extremely difficult to achieve in practice and is almost impossible to verify afterward.

This time, since there had been no human casualties during the first outbreak, the Army, the C.D.C., and Hazleton jointly decided to isolate the monkeys—leave them alone and let the virus burn.

The Ebola Reston virus jumped quickly from room to room, and as it blossomed in the monkeys, it seemed to mutate spontaneously into something that looked quite a lot like influenza.

Then, in mid-February, a Hazleton animal caretaker who will be called John Coleus was performing a necropsy on a dead monkey when he cut his thumb with a scalpel.

It could be like the common cold—it could have a latency period when you are shedding virus before you develop symptoms—and by the time you know you are sick, you might have infected sixteen people.

They had all been infected with the agent.

The virus had entered their bloodstreams and multiplied in their cells. Ebola proliferated in their bodies.

“I was more frightened in retrospect,” he said.

A tiny difference in the virus’s genetic code, probably resulting in a small structural change in the shape of one of the seven mysterious proteins in the virus particle, had apparently changed its effects tremendously in humans, rendering it mild or harmless even though it had destroyed the monkeys.

One day in his office, Jahrling showed me a photograph of some Ebola-virus particles. They resembled noodles that had been cooked al dente.