The Centers for Disease Control focused its efforts on trying to trace the source of the virus, and the trail eventually led back to the Ferlite Farms monkey-storage facility near Manila. All of the Reston monkeys had come from there. The place was a way station on their trip from the forests of Mindanao to Washington. Investigators found that monkeys had been dying in large numbers there, too. But it looked as though no Philippine monkey workers had become sick either. If it was an African virus, what was it doing in the Philippines? And why weren’t monkey handlers dying? Yet the virus was able to destroy a monkey. Something very strange was going on here. Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.
December 18, Monday
The decon team scrubbed the building with bleach until they took the paint off the concrete floors, and still they kept scrubbing. When they were satisfied that all the building’s inside surfaces had been scoured, they move on to the final stage, the gas. The decon team taped the exterior doors, windows, and vents of the building with silver duct tape. They taped sheets of plastic over the exterior openings of the ventilation system. They made the building airtight. 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 will kill almost anything.
The decon team brought thirty-nine Sunbeam electric frying pans to the monkey house. Sunbeam electric frying pans are the Army’s tool of choice for a decon job. The team laid an electric cable along the floor throughout the building, strung with outlets, like a cord for Christmas-tree lights. At points along the cable, they plugged in the Sunbeam frying pans. They wired the cable to a master switch. Into each Sunbeam frying pan they dropped a handful of disinfecting crystals. The crystals were white and resembled salt. They dialed the pans to high. At 1800 hours on December 18, someone threw the master switch, and the Sunbeams began to cook. The crystals boiled away, releasing formaldehyde gas. Since the building’s doors, windows, and vents were taped shut, the gas had nowhere to go, and it stayed inside the building for three days. The gas penetrated the air ducts, soaked the offices, got into drawers in the desks, and got inside pencil sharpeners in the drawers. It infiltrated Xerox machines and worked its way inside personal computers and inside the cushions of chairs and fingered down into the floor drains until it touched pools of lingering bleach in the water traps. Finally the decon team, still wearing space suits, went back inside the building and collect the spore samples. The Sunbeam treatment had killed the Niger.
There is an old piece of wisdom in biohazard work that goes like this: you can never know when life is exterminated. Life will survive almost any blitz. Total, unequivocal sterilization is extremely difficult to achieve in practice and is almost impossible to verify afterward. However, a Sunbeam cookout that lasts for three days and exterminates all samples of Niger implies success. The monkey house had been sterilized. Ebola had met opposition. For a short while, until life could re-establish itself there, the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was the only building in the world where nothing lived, nothing at all.
THE MOST DANGEROUS STRAIN
1990 January
The strain of Ebola virus that had erupted near Washington went into hiding somewhere in the rain forest. The cycling went on. The cycling must always go on if the virus is to maintain its existence. The Army, having certified that the monkey house had been nuked, returned to the possession of Hazleton Resrach Products. Hazleton began buying more monkeys from the Philippines, from the same monkey house near Manila, and restocked the building with crab-eating monkeys that had been trapped in the rain forests of Mindanao. Less than a month later, in the middle of January, some of the monkeys in Room C began dying with bloody noses. Dan Dalgard called Peter Jahrling. “Looks like we’re affected again,” he said.
The virus was Ebola. It had come from the Philippines. 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. Dan Dalgard hoped to save at least some of the monkeys, and his company did not want the Army to come back with space suits.
What happened in that building was a kind of experiment. Now they would see what Ebola could do naturally in a population of monkeys living in a confined air space, in a kind of city, as it were. 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 the common cold. But it was an Ebola cold. The monkeys died with great quantities of clear mucus and green mucus running from their nose, mixed with blood that would not clot. Their lungs were destroyed, rotten and swimming with Ebloa virus. They had pneumonia. When a single animal with a nosebleed showed up in a room, generally 80 percent of the animals died in that room shortly afterward. The virus was extraordinarily infective in monkeys. The Institute scientists suspected that they were seeing a mutant strain of Ebola, something new and a little different from what they had seen just a month before, in December, when the Army had nuked the monkey house. It was frightening—it was as if Ebola could change its character fast. As if a different strain could appear in a month’s time. The clinical symptoms of the disease served as a reminder of the fact that Ebola is related to certain kind of colds seen in human children. It seemed that the virus could adapt quickly to new host, and that it could change its character rapidly as it entered a new population.
bola apparently drifted through the building’s air-handling ducts. By January 24, it had entered Room B, and monkeys in that room started going into shock and dying with runny noses, red eyes, and masklike expressions on their faces. In the following weeks, the infection entered Room I,F,E, and D, and the animals in these rooms virtually all died. 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. He had been slicing apart the liver, one of the favorite nesting sites of Ebola. The scalpel blade, smeared with liver cells and blood, went deep into this thumb. He had had a major exposure to Ebola.
The liver that he had been cutting was rushed to USAMRIID for analysis. Tom Geisbert looked at a piece of it under his microscope and, to his dismay, found that it was “incredibly hot—I mean, wall to wall with virus.” Everyone at the Institute thought John Coleus was going to die. “Around her,” Peter Jahrling told me, “we were frankly fearful that this guy had bought the farm.” The C.D.C. decided not to put him into isolation. So Coleus visited bars and drank beer with his friends.
“Here at the Institute,” Peter Jahrling said, “we were absolutely appalled when that guy went out to bars, drinking. Clearly the C.D.C. should not have let that happen. This was a serious virus and a serious situation. We don’t know a whole lot about the virus. 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. There’s an awful lot we don’t know about this virus. We don’t know where it came from, and we don’t know what form it will take when it appears next time.”