The Hot Zone (39 page)

The emergence of
AIDS
, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.
The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth. Many of them come from the tattered edges of tropical rain forest, or they come from tropical savanna that is being settled rapidly by people. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world’s plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere. Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guanarito.
VEE
. Monkeypox. Dengue. Chikungunya. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Junin. The rabieslike strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus. Then there is
HIV
—which is very much an emerging virus, because its penetration of the human species is increasing rapidly, with no end in sight. The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean-Congo. Sindbis. O’nyongnyong. Nameless São Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere
with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not “like” the idea of five billion humans. Or it could also be said that the extreme amplification of the human race, which has occurred only in the past hundred years or so, has suddenly produced a very large quantity of meat, which is sitting everywhere in the biosphere and may not be able to defend itself against a life form that might want to consume it. Nature has interesting ways of balancing itself. The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps
AIDS
is the first step in a natural process of clearance.

A
IDS
is arguably the worst environmental disaster of the twentieth century. The
AIDS
virus may well have jumped into the human race from African primates, from monkeys and anthropoid apes. For example,
HIV-2
(one of the two major strains of
HIV
) may be a mutant virus that jumped into us from an African monkey known as the sooty mangabey, perhaps when monkey hunters or trappers touched bloody tissue,
HIV-1
(the other strain) may have jumped into us from chimpanzees—perhaps when hunters butchered chimpanzees. A strain of simian
AIDS
virus was recently isolated from a chimpanzee in Gabon, in West Africa, which is, so
far, the closest thing to
HIV
-1 that anyone has yet found in the animal kingdom.

The
AIDS
virus was first noticed in 1980 in Los Angeles by a doctor who realized that his gay male patients were dying of an infectious agent. If anyone at the time had suggested that this unknown disease in gay men in southern California came from wild chimpanzees in Africa, the medical community would have collectively burst out laughing. No one is laughing now. I find it extremely interesting to consider the idea that the chimpanzee is an endangered rain-forest animal and then to contemplate the idea that a virus that moved from chimps into us is suddenly not endangered at all. You could say that rain-forest viruses are extremely good at looking after their own interests.

The
AIDS
virus is a fast mutator; it changes constantly. It is a hypermutant, a shape shifter, spontaneously altering its character as it moves through populations and through individuals. It mutates even in the course of one infection, and a person who dies of
HIV
is usually infected with multiple strains, which have all arisen spontaneously as mutants in the body. The fact that the virus mutates rapidly means that vaccines for it will be very difficult to develop. In a larger sense, it means that the
AIDS
virus is a natural survivor of changes in ecosystems. The
AIDS
virus and other emerging viruses are surviving the wreck of the tropical biosphere because they can mutate faster than any changes taking place in their ecosystems.
They must be good at escaping trouble, if some of them have been around for as long as four billion years. I tend to think of rats leaving a ship.

I suspect that
AIDS
might not be Nature’s preeminent display of power. Whether the human race can actually maintain a population of five billion or more without a crash with a hot virus remains an open question. Unanswered. The answer lies hidden in the labyrinth of tropical ecosystems. A
IDS
is the revenge of the rain forest. It may be only the beginning.

No problem, I thought. Of course, I’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. No problem at all. Everything will be all right. Plenty of people have gone inside Kitum Cave without becoming sick. Three to eighteen days. As the amplification begins, you feel nothing. It made me think of Joe McCormick, the C.D.C. official who had clashed with the Army over the management of the Ebola Reston outbreak. I remembered the story of him in Sudan, hunting Ebola virus. At the end of a plane flight into deep bush, he had come face to face with Ebola in a hut full of dying patients, had pricked his thumb with a bloody needle, and got lucky, and had survived the experience. In the end, Joe McCormick had been right about the Ebola Reston virus: it had not proved to be highly infectious in people. Then I thought about another Joe McCormick discovery, one of the few breakthroughs in the treatment of Ebola virus. In Sudan, thinking he was going to die of Ebola, he had discovered
that a bottle of Scotch is the only good treatment for exposure to a filovirus.

I drove to the abandoned monkey house one day in autumn, to see what had become of it. It was a warm day in Indian summer. A brown haze hung over Washington. I turned off the Beltway and approached the building discreetly. The place was deserted and as quiet as a tomb. Out front, a sweet-gum tree dropped an occasional leaf. F
OR LEASE
signs sat in front of many of the offices around the parking lot. I sensed the presence not of a virus but of financial illness—clinical signs of the eighties, like your skin peeling off after a bad fever. I walked across the grassy area behind the building until I reached the Army’s insertion point, a glass door. It was locked. Shreds of silver duct tape dangled from the door’s edges. I looked inside and saw a floor mottled with reddish brown stains. A sign on the wall said
CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS
. Next to it, I discerned the air-lock corridor, the gray zone through which the soldiers had passed into the hot zone. It had gray cinder-block walls: the ideal gray zone.

My feet rustled through shreds of plastic in the grass. I found elderberries ripening around a rusted air-handling machine. I heard a ball bounce, and saw a boy dribbling a basketball on a playground. The ball cast rubbery echoes off the former monkey house. Children’s shouts came from the day-care center through the trees. Exploring
the back of the building, I came to a window and looked in. Climbing vines had grown up inside the room and had pressed against the glass of the windows, seeking warmth and light. Where had those vines found water inside the building? The vine was Tartarian honeysuckle, a weed that grows in waste places and on abandoned ground. The flowers of Tartarian honeysuckle have no smell. That is, they smell like a virus; and they flourish in ruined habitats. Tartarian honeysuckle reminded me of Tartarus, the land of the dead in Virgil’s
Aeneid
, the underworld, where the shades of the dead whispered in the shadows.

I couldn’t see through the tangled vines into the former hot zone. It was like looking into a rain forest. I walked around to the side of the building and found another glass door beribboned with tape. I pressed my nose against the glass and cupped my hands around my eyes to stop reflections, and saw a bucket smeared with a dry brown crust. The crust looked like dried monkey excrement. Whatever it was, I guessed it had been stirred up with Clorox bleach. A spider had strung a web between a wall and the bucket of waste. On the floor under the web, the spider had dropped husks of flies and yellow jackets. The time of year being autumn, the spider had left egg cases in its web, preparing for its own cycle of replication. Life had established itself in the monkey house. Ebola had risen in these rooms, flashed its colors, fed, and subsided into the forest. It will be back.

IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

(Military rank given as of the time of the Reston event.)

“CHARLES MONET
.” A French expatriate living in western Kenya. In January 1980, he essentially melts down with Marburg virus while traveling on an airplane.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NANCY JAAX
. Veterinary pathologist at
USAMRIID
. Begins working with Ebola virus in 1983, when she gets a hole in her space-suit glove. Becomes chief of pathology at
USAMRIID
in 1989, and during the winter of that year becomes a player in the Reston biohazard operation.

COLONEL GERALD (“JERRY”) JAAX
. Chief of the veterinary division at
USAMRIID
. Married to Nancy Jaax. Had never worn a biological space suit, but becomes the mission leader of the space-suited
SWAT
team during the Reston biohazard operation.

EBOLA
. (Pronounced ee
-BOH
-la.) Extremely lethal virus from the tropics, its exact origins unknown. It has three known subtypes:
Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan
, and
Ebola Reston
. It is closely related
to Marburg virus. All of them constitute the filovirus family.

EUGENE (“GENE”) JOHNSON
. Civilian virus hunter working for the Army. Specialist in Ebola. In the spring of 1988, following the death of “Peter Cardinal,” leads an Army expedition to Kitum Cave in Mount Elgon. Chief of logistics and safety for the Reston biohazard operation.

“PETER CARDINAL
.” Danish boy visiting his parents in Kenya in the summer of 1987, when he dies of Marburg virus. The Army keeps a strain of Marburg named after him in its freezers.

DAN DALGARD
. Veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit (the Reston monkey house).

PETER JAHRLING
. Civilian Army virologist. Codiscoverer of the strain of virus that burns through the Reston monkey house.

TOM GEISBERT
. Intern at
USAMRIID
. In the fall of 1989, is responsible for the operation of
USAMRIID’S
electron microscope. Codiscoverer of the virus.

COLONEL CLARENCE JAMES (“C. J.”) PETERS, MD
. Chief of the disease-assessment division at
USAMRIID
. Overall leader of the Reston biohazard operation.

MAJOR GENERAL PHILIP K. RUSSELL. MD
. The general who gave the command to dispatch the military teams to Reston.

DR. JOSEPH B. MCCORMICK
. Chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the C.D.C. Treated human Ebola patients in a hut in Sudan, where he stuck himself with a bloody needle.

AMPLIFICATION
. Multiplication of a virus through either (1) the body of an individual host or (2) a population of hosts. See also
extreme amplification
.

BRICK
. (Military slang.) Pure crystal-like block of packed virus particles that grows inside a cell. Also known as an
inclusion body
. In this book, often called a
crystalloid
(author’s own term).

BUBBLE STRETCHER
. Portable biocontainment pod used for transportation of a hot patient.

BURN; BURNING
. See
explosive chain of lethal transmission.

CHEMTURION SPACE SUIT
. Pressurized, heavy-duty biological space suit used in Biosafety Level 4 containment areas. Also known as a
blue suit
because it is bright blue.

CRASH AND BLEED OUT
. (Military slang.) To die of shock, with profuse hemorrhages from the orifices of the body.

CRYSTALLOID
. See
brick
.

DECON
. (Military slang.) To decontaminate; decontamination.

ELECTRON MICROSCOPE
. Large and very powerful microscope that uses a beam of electrons to enlarge the image of a very small object, such as a virus, and replicate it on a screen.

EMERGING VIRUSES
. “Viruses that have recently increased their incidence and appear likely to continue increasing.” Term and definition coined by Stephen S. Morse, a virologist at Rockefeller University.

ENVIROCHEM
. Green liquid disinfectant used in air-lock chemical showers. An effective virus killer.

EXPLOSIVE CHAIN OF LETHAL TRANSMISSION
. Sort of biological meltdown wherein a lethal infectious agent spreads explosively through a population, killing a large percentage of the population. Also known as
burning
.

EXTREME AMPLIFICATION
. Multiplication of a virus everywhere in a host, partly transforming the host into virus.