Rabid (23 page)

But the fast zombie—well, that is a different beast entirely. These are more often than not the
infected
zombies, creatures of a fictional universe where a mysterious virus has descended on the population, spreading through bites and causing its human victims to become snarling, rapacious devourers of manflesh. Their means of murder is debased, to be sure, but their frenzy is not terribly far removed from the ancient
lyssa,
or wolfish rage, that spurred Heracles to slay his family or that swept Hector along to both glory and folly during the Trojan War. The fast zombie is a man (or woman) made into an insensate, murderous animal. The paragon of the fast zombie film, and almost certainly the best zombie film of the past decade, is
28 Days Later,
in which a virus called “rage” spreads through society. The film’s
director, Danny Boyle, says he was specifically inspired by rabies, because it creates not just animal aggression in its victims but also an awareness, a mortal discomfort, as well as the physical horrors of hydrophobia. “We wanted the zombies to be bloodthirsty,” Boyle says, “but completely full of fear themselves.” In his desire to portray the agony of the zombie, he harks back to the legacy of Poe, carried down from Ovid, of horror tales forcing us to imagine the awful transformation affecting ourselves.

The most recent film adaptation of
I Am Legend
—the only to retain the original title—was another fast zombie affair, though not quite as effective as Boyle’s lean masterpiece. As in the book, it’s a disease that afflicts the monsters—they are pointedly
not
called vampires—though its particulars are roughly as convoluted as in the book; in the film’s case, it’s a modified version of measles, an engineered virus that cured cancer, on the plus side, but then unfortunately mutated to turn everybody into bloodthirsty ghouls. To see the transformation wrought in Neville’s dog, though, makes the parallel to rabies even more explicit. In the film’s telling, Neville (played by Will Smith) has a dog, Samantha, all along, and indeed Sam serves as his only companion for his daylight rovings and experimentations. When Sam gets bitten by an infected dog, and Neville is unsuccessful in saving her through serum, he sits on the floor of his lab embracing her while he waits to see what will transpire. Soon he gets his answer. Her pupils dilate; her teeth stretch into fangs; she begins to growl at her master. At the moment she lunges for his face, he regretfully converts his embrace into a choke hold; the most moving shot of the film is Neville’s teary face as he strangles the life out of his one remaining friend.

To be clear: the fast zombie is not a rabid zombie, per se. These films are not in any sense
about
rabies, or about the fear of rabies; or, rather, if they are, it’s only in the sense that the endorphins we feel on the treadmill are “about” the predator (not) nipping at our Nikes. A hundred years have passed since Americans have died from rabies in any meaningful number. And yet the basic trope of the fast zombie
tale—the viral force that cuts out a soul, leaving a ravaging animal behind—has rabies woven deep into its DNA. Shielded from the disease, we nevertheless cannot wholly free ourselves from the fear.

The same year that Richard Matheson made the vampire more metaphorically rabid, the true rabidity of the vampire’s animal sidekick became more widely appreciated. Late one summer morning in 1953, a seven-year-old boy on a Florida cattle ranch, in the shrubby pine flatwoods of Hillsborough County, near Tampa, was out searching for a lost ball when a depraved creature emerged from some bushes. It was a yellow bat—a species that eats nothing but insects—but today it seemed determined to make a meal of the boy. It latched on to his chest, holding fast even as he ran screaming to his mother. She knocked the bat to the ground, and the boy’s father killed it. As he comforted his son, he remembered something he had read in a cattlemen’s magazine, about how cows in Central America were catching rabies from vampire bat bites. He called up the local health authorities and insisted that they test the bat’s carcass for the deadly disease.

For centuries, rabies had been known to scientists and citizens alike as a malady of the dog. Yes, the experts allowed, this disease could also manifest in other four-legged creatures: wolves and foxes, skunks and cattle. But when it came to bats—which harbor rabies far more frequently, and in a far more stable way, than any other species—science was shockingly slow to recognize the truth. Stretching back to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, observers have reported the bites of vampire bats to be “poisonous.” Cattle in Central and South America are under constant assault from
vampiros,
and on rare occasions, often after a daytime attack, fully half of a cow herd would die from a terrible paralysis. Beginning in 1906, ranches in southern Brazil were decimated by a condition that came to be called
peste das cadeiras,
or the “plague of chairs”—so named because the hindquarters of the animals were being immobilized, forcing them into an unusual sitting pose. The cattle also salivated excessively, had difficulty swallowing.
As the paralysis slowly ascended, the animals became emaciated and finally died of respiratory failure. By 1908, more than four thousand head of cattle and one thousand horses had succumbed to this inexplicable disease.

In 1911, a São Paulo laboratory had a breakthrough: on the basis of characteristic spots, called Negri bodies, microscopically visible in brain tissue from fallen animals, it identified rabies as the culprit. And yet—even though vampire bats had commonly been seen biting affected herds in the unusual circumstance of broad daylight—the scientific community in Brazil was convinced that unseen dogs must be to blame. A major turning point came in 1916, when an epidemiological study pointed to vampire bats as the cause. That same year, rabies was positively diagnosed in a fruit bat. After hundreds of years of bat-borne rabies deaths in cattle, veterinarians and health officials slowly came to realize that
peste das cadeiras,
along with similarly ruinous livestock mortality events in Central and South America (
tumbi baba
in Paraguay,
rabia paresiante
in Argentina,
renguera
in Costa Rica,
derriengue
in Central America,
tronchado
in Mexico), was a devastation brought by aerial assault.

The first human deaths attributed to rabies spread by vampire bats occurred in Trinidad in 1929. Since dog rabies had been eliminated from the island in 1918, scientists were able to quickly and correctly assign the role of vector to the bat. In the three decades that followed, eighty-nine humans and thousands of domestic animals died from vampire bat rabies in Trinidad. But outside of Trinidad, it wasn’t until the early 1950s that human deaths from vampire bat rabies were recognized. In 1951, a Mexican man, prior to succumbing to what would eventually be confirmed as rabies, told his doctors that four weeks prior he had suffered a penetrating bite while defending his children from an unusually aggressive vampire bat. Subsequent investigation by health officials revealed that in the man’s home village of Platanito, four children had died of paralytic neurological disease since being bitten by the same bat.

By June 1953, when the life of the seven-year-old Florida boy was at stake after a daylight attack by a yellow bat, the prevalence of rabies
in vampire bats was widely known. But North American bat species, of which the vast majority are insectivorous, were thought to be safe. Luckily, the boy’s father was able to prevail upon health officials to perform the test. Within hours, W. R. Hoffert, a senior bacteriologist in the Tampa regional laboratory, saw the telltale Negri bodies in the bat’s brain, a finding confirmed by further investigation at the Florida Board of Health in Jacksonville. The boy was given the postexposure vaccine, and he never came down with the disease.

News of this case prompted far more vigilant surveillance of rabies in American bats. By the end of 1965, infected bats had been identified in all states except Rhode Island, Alaska, and Hawaii; today, only Hawaii’s bats are rabies-free. Bat bites are now the cause of nearly all human rabies infections in the United States, accounting for thirty-two out of thirty-three deaths from domestic exposure since 1990. Why is this so? Bat bites are so subtle that people can be infected without their being aware of it, especially in the night, when a bat bite is sometimes not even painful enough to wake a sleeping human. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that anyone who awakens with a bat in his or her room seek out vaccination for rabies. Likewise, any unattended child or mentally incapacitated person found in the presence of a bat should be treated as though he or she were exposed. By foot, rabies may strike with snarling fury, but by air it arrives with the silent efficiency of an assassin.

Epidemics are always fraught with moral overtones, but never so much as in the case of AIDS, whose earliest populations of victims—gay men and intravenous drug users—were also among the most marginalized groups in Western culture. That the disease would also prove to be animal in origin, with all the cultural baggage that saddles such zoonotic infections, was unfortunate but unavoidable. What is more surprising is how many different animal suspects were considered before the right one was ID’d. In a letter to the
Lancet
in 1983, a Harvard researcher named Jane Teas published a brief letter fingering
the pig, of all creatures: the first known Haitian cases (1978) of the syndrome, she pointed out, were followed soon afterward by a large-scale outbreak of African swine fever, a high-fatality infection in pigs that, like AIDS, affects the lymphatic system and weakens its hosts against other, opportunistic infections. Around the same time, the family pets, too, came into play. Media reports noted the similarity of AIDS to feline leukemia (which it resembles only somewhat) and canine distemper, or parvovirus (which it resembles hardly at all). Thus did the most terrifying illness of the twentieth century, a disease that changed an entire generation’s consciousness about sexual behavior, begin with an uncommonly large menagerie of nonhuman perpetrators.

Speculation soon came to rest for good on the monkey. In late 1984, a research team at Harvard isolated a retrovirus from the blood of captive macaques that were suffering from AIDS-like symptoms. Unable to find a comparable virus in wild macaques, the scientists theorized that the macaques had caught the disease in captivity from a green monkey—whose wild brethren did, in fact, harbor a similar retrovirus. This “green monkey” theory catapulted into the public imagination, especially as the scientists began to outdo one another in their explicit theories for how the cross-infection transpired. A short June 1987 letter to the
Lancet
cited a 1973 anthropology paper reporting that the Congolese, in order to whip themselves into “intense sexual activity,” injected monkey blood (from the corresponding gender of monkey, naturally) into their genital regions, as well as into their thighs and backs. The following month Abraham Karpas, a British AIDS researcher at the University of Cambridge, blew up this lurid just-so story into a full-page speculation in the
New Scientist
.

For more than a decade following that report, urban legends about the animal origins of AIDS abounded.
*
Much of what made AIDS so
hysteria-inducing, of course, was the combination of its fatality rate (90 percent, in cases where infection with HIV progressed to the full-fledged syndrome) with the sexual mode of its transmission. It made a certain sick sense that such a beastly disease might be bestial in origin—might originate, that is, in bestiality. Anyone who grew up in late-1980s America, as we did, can attest to the variety and range of nonsense that circulated among adolescents of the time. But a similar set of stories swirled across most of the Western world. One AIDS researcher interviewed teens in her native Newfoundland and got responses like this:

And this:

Meanwhile, in Scotland, a focus group convened by AIDS opinion researchers in 1990 yielded up this classic exchange of etiologic theorizing:

Note the way that each of these two groups, besides mentioning Africa, also fixate on the foreigners closer to hand. The Scots rail at the “pakis” (a slur that, having begun as shorthand for “Pakistanis,” quickly evolved to encompass all Muslim immigrants to the United Kingdom), while the Newfies, for whom immigrants, let alone dark-skinned ones, are an uncommon sight, look nearer askance to Cuba or Mexico. One is reminded acutely of those dog-headed men whom the medieval cartographers sketched around the margins—but only in the lands far away from themselves.

Indeed, as one might expect, the residents of Latin America and Africa, including those most at risk for AIDS, see matters differently. In 1990, an AIDS researcher in Punta Gorda on the coast of Belize recorded this exchange between two women in a bar: