"We've had twenty-four years of safe work," Callis said to his tormentors. "Let's not get it out of proportion now."
After the slide show, the scientists led the tour to the ominous-looking Lab 257, before directing them into the perimeter guardhouse. Each guest forked over his personal items — watches, wallets, wedding rings, coins, paper notes, pencils — which were placed in small gray envelopes personalized with their initials.
"You have to go into the lab like Mother Nature brought you into this world," Callis drily quipped to his tour group. Everyone was ordered to strip in the change room and don white coveralls, white socks, and white sneakers. Then, with the door behind them closed and air-sealed, the door at the opposite side of the room was depressurized. It hissed loudly, then opened into a maze of hallways, dimly illuminated with fluorescent light. After observing farm animals in various stages of different infections, the group stripped naked and waited single file to take decontamination showers before leaving the lab, following the same strict procedures required of workers in the early days. As they changed back into their street clothes, Walker peeled two Band-Aids off a reporter's fingers, informing him that the crevices harbored viruses.
Dr. Callis saw the group of fifteen men to the harbor and graciously thanked them for their interest. Did the press learn anything new in this, the second glimpse of Plum Island? "The whole thing was pretty redundant," says one attendee, comparing the tour with the earlier 1971 press junket. Another observed "a serious lack of mission at the island….One would expect to find a sense of pride and accomplishment among the workers there. Based on our conversations, such is not the case."
After the grand tour, Klein reflected on the experience. "Now it turns out, there's a whole laundry list of such diseases they've been researching." Had Klein known the true condition of the facilities Plum Island was concealing; or that the insect study recommended by the advisory board was snubbed; or that the study was a joint affair with the Army; or the deadly effects of human exposure to the Rift Valley fever virus; or the true number of casualties that the new Zagazig 501 strain wrought upon Egypt — things might have been different. Instead, without precaution the work went full steam ahead. Of Klein and his visit, Dr. Callis says twenty years later, "I didn't give a damn." The federal government wasn't going to be told what it could and could not do by some local politicians.
Try as he might, county executive John V. N. Klein didn't slice through the veil of secrecy over Plum Island. A noble failure, it had little if any impact on the island's activities. After the 1978 virus outbreak and the flap over Rift Valley fever virus, the island dropped the "World's Safest Lab" moniker. In fact, it dropped public contact altogether. The gates would not reopen until another Plum Island biological debacle fifteen years later.
THE RIFT VALLEY FEVER EXPERIMENT
Unlike bacteria, which can be seen easily under a traditional microscope, viruses are too small to be detected. To measure the concentration of viruses, scientists use the plaque-reduction method, whereby a visibly clear area in a culture dish, called a plaque, is left behind after the virus destroys the healthy culture cells. By measuring the plaque — essentially the damage the invisible viruses have done — you can get an idea of the titer, or how virulent and concentrated the virus is. Viruses are measured in plaque-forming units, or PFUs. In the Plum Island study of the deadly strain of the Rift Valley fever virus, the lab techs took a starter culture of African green monkey kidney cells out of the freezer and propagated them in culture plates using a growth medium of amino acids and heated calf fetus serum. To brew large quantities of virus, they fed Zagazig 501-plus on the monkey cells they cultured inside sterilized fermenters, not unlike the ones seen at a microbrew pub. Zagazig 501 was the Rift Valley fever strain pulled from a fatal hemorrhagic human case during the Egyptian outbreak. Peters added some kick at Fort Detrick — the plus — when he passed the virus through two sets of lung cell cultures taken from rhesus monkey fetuses. It was potent as hell. From the fermenter, they decanted the slurry into hundreds of 1-milliliter ampoules and stored them in nitrogen-cooled freezers at minus 70 degrees Celsius. They thawed each ampoule immediately before pacing briskly through the "hot corridor" to the animal room to inject a test animal.
Rift Valley fever virus affects its victim much like the well-known Ebola virus. Ten of the sixty sheep were used as controls, meaning they were not afforded the luxury of a vaccine. Twelve hours after the unlucky ones are exposed to the virus, viremia — the onslaught of a virus infection within the body — begins. Their temperatures rise sharply and their hearts beat rapidly in an attempt to circulate an immune response to parts of the body suffering from localized attack. But their immune systems cannot counter the multiplying germ. The blood circulates viruses to all quarters of the body, where they attach to the surface of organ and membrane cells, then infiltrate those cells. Within the cytoplasm, the virus hijacks the cell's machinery and replicates itself exponentially. Inside of one hour the cells lyse, or burst, unleashing thousands of new baby viruses upon neighboring healthy cells, where they attach and repeat the vicious cycle ad infinitum. The exploded cells cause edema, or large buildups of fluid in the connective tissues throughout the body. The sheep spasm and lose their gait, leaning up against the cell-block wall of the windowless room to stay upright. A pregnant ewe spontaneously aborts her young onto the floor in a grotesque scene. The sheep vomit blood and discharge red-tinged mucus from their noses. The dizziness in their heads makes them slide, one by one, down the wall and onto the concrete floor.
Within forty-eight hours, eight will be dead. Samples of each animal's blood-riddled excreta are taken to see if the virus passed through. The two that make it to recovery are then killed, along with the fifty sheep in the test flock. Each is lifted onto a cart by an animal handler and wheeled into the necropsy room. On kill day, veterinarians necropsy (animal autopsy) each of the animals under bright examination lights, snap photos of the diseased internal organs for later analysis, clip tissue samples from here and there, and send the carcasses down the chute to the incinerator charging room.
The initial experiment was a success. The human vaccine produced immunity in all of the vaccinated sheep and warded off the virus.
With the April 1 safety deadline met, the Plum Island scientists decided to push their luck. They revaccinated employees and continued the groundbreaking research, extending the study through the end of April and into the start of the mosquito season. Supplanting the ubiquitous foot-and-mouth disease virus work, Rift Valley fever fast became the island's germ of choice. Eight Shetland ponies injected with Rift Valley fever were observed daily and their rectal temperatures recorded for forty days to see if they were susceptible hosts or carriers. Necropsied on day forty-one, the ponies showed no internal signs of disease or clinical signs. However, the vets found that the Arabian horses maintained low levels of viremia, and, as such, were potential reservoirs to infect biting mosquitoes.
Next, they brought in another sixty-three sheep for a third Rift Valley fever project. This study revealed that infected sheep could pass USDA food inspections for human consumption. Drs. Dardiri and Walker observed the virus lingering in spleen tissues, but reasoned that "the spleen is not normally eaten." The scientists also announced in a press release that they produced "antigens and reagents" for future use. Put more plainly, they were brewing Zagazig 501 virus in gross quantities on Plum Island.