John Coleus had a minor medical condition that required surgery. Doctors performed the operation while he was in the incubation period after his exposure to Ebola. There is no record indicating that he bled excessively during the surgery. He came through fine, and he is alive today, with no ill effects from his exposure.
As for the monkey house, the entire building died. The Army didn’t have to nuke it. It was nuked by the Ebola Reston virus. Once again, there were no human casualties. However, something eerie and perhaps sinister occurred. A total of four men had worked as caretakers in the monkey house: Jarvis Purdy, who had a heart; Milton Frantig, who had thrown up on the lawn; John Coleus, who had cut his thumb; and a fourth man. All four men eventually tested positive for Ebola Reston virus. They had all been infected with the agent. The virus had entered their bloodstreams and multiplied in their cells. Ebola proliferated in their bodies. It cycled in them. It carried on its life inside the monkey workers. But it did not make them sick, even while it multiplied inside them. If they had headaches or felt ill, none of them could recall it. Eventually the virus cleared from their systems naturally, disappeared from the blood, and as of this writing none of the men was affected by it. The are among the very, very few human survivors of Ebola virus. John Coleus certainly caught the virus when he cut himself with a bloody scalpel, no question about that. What is more worrisome is that the others had not cut themselves, yet the virus entered their bloodstreams. It got there somehow. Most likely it entered their blood thought contact with the lungs. It infected them through the air. When it became apparent to the Army researchers that three of the four men who became infected had not cut themselves, just about everyone at USAMRIID concluded that Ebola can spread through the air.
Dr. Philip Russell—the general who made the decision to send in the Army to stop the virus—recently said to me that although he had been “scared to death” about Ebola at the time, it wasn’t until afterward, when he understood that the virus was spreading in the air among the monkeys, that the true potential for disaster sank in for him. “I was more frightened in retrospect,” he said. “When I saw the respiratory evidence coming from those monkeys, I said to myself, My God, with certain kinds of small changes, this virus could become one that travels in rapid respiratory transmission through humans. I’m talking about the Black Death. Imagine a virus with the infectiousness of influenza and the mortality rate of black plague in the Middle Ages—that’s what we’re talking about.”
The workers at Reston had symptomless Ebola virus. Why didn’t it kill them? To this day, no one knows the answer to that question. Symptomless Ebola—the men had been infected with something like an Ebola cold. 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 effect tremendously in humans, rendering it mild or harmless even though it had destroyed the monkeys. This strain of Ebola knew the difference between a monkey and a person. And if it should mutate in some other direction…
ONE DAY IN spring, I went to visit Colonel Nancy Jaax, to interview her about her work during the Reston event. We talked in her office. She wore a black military sweater with silver eagles on the shoulder boards—she had recently made full colonel. A baby parrot slept in a box in the corner. The parrot woke up and squeaked.
“Are you hungry?” she asked it. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” She pulled a turkey baster out of a bag and loaded it with parrot mush. She stuck the baster into the parrot’s beak and squeezed the baster bulb, and the parrot closed it eyes with satisfaction.
She waved her hand at some filing cabinets. “Want to look at some Ebola? Take your pick.”
“You show me.”
She searched through a cabinet and removed a handful of glass slides, and carried them into another room, where a microscope sat on a table. It had two sets of eyepieces so that two people could look into it at the same time.
I sat down and stared in the microscope, into white nothingness.
“Okay, here’s a good one,” she said, and placed a slide under the lens.
I saw a field of cells. Here and there, pockets of cells had burst and liquefied.
“That’s male reproductive tissue,” she said. “It’s heavily infected. This is Ebola Zaire in a monkey that we exposed through the lungs in 1986, in the study that Gene Johnson and I did.”
Looking at the slice of monkey testicle, I got an unpleasant sensation. “You mean, it got into the monkey’s lungs and moved to its—?”
“Yeah. it’s pretty yucky,” she said. “Now I’m going to make you dizzy. I’m going to show you the lung.”
The scene shifted, and we were looking at rotted pink Belgian lace.
“This is a slice of lung tissue. A monkey that was exposed through the lungs. See how the virus bubbles up in the lung? It’s Ebola Zaire.”
I could see individual cells, and some of them were swollen with dark specks.
“We’ll go to higher magnification.”
The cells got bigger. The dark specks became angular, shadowy blobs. The blobs were bursting out of the cells, like something hatching.
“Those are big, fat bricks,” she said.
They were Ebola crystalloids bursting out of the lungs. The lungs were popping Ebola directly into the air. My scalp crawled and I felt suddenly like a civilian who had seen something that maybe civilians should not see.
“These lungs are very hot,” she said in a matter-of-face voice. “You see those bricks budding directly into the air spaces of the lung? When you cough, this stuff comes up your throat in your sputum. That’s why you don’t want someone who has Ebola coughing in your face.”
“My God, it knows all about lungs, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe not. It might live in an insect, and insects don’t have lungs. But you see here how Ebola has adapted to this lung. It’s budding out of the lung, right straight into the air.”
“We’re looking at a highly sophisticated organism, aren’t we?”
“You’re absolutely right. This hummer has an established life cycle. You get into “what if?” game. What if it got into human lungs? If it mutates, it could be a problem. A big problem.”
In march 1990, while the second outbreak at Reston was happening, the C.D.C. slapped a heavy set of restrictions on monkey importers, tightening the testing and quarantine procedures. The C.D.C. also temporarily revoked the license of three companies, Hazleton Research Products, the Charles River Primates Corporation, and Worldwide Primates, charging these companies with violations of quarantine rules. (Their licenses were later reinstated. The C.D.C.‘s action effectively stopped the importation of monkeys into the United States for several months. The total loss to Hazleton ran into the millions of dollars. Monkeys are worth money. Despite the C.D.C.‘s action against Hazleton, scientists at USAMRIID, and even some at the C.D.C., gave Dalgard and his company high praise for making the decision to hand over the monkey facility to the Army. “It was hard for Hazleton, but they did the right thing,” Peter Jahrling said to me, summing up the general opinion of the experts.
Hazleton had been renting the monkey house from a commercial landlord. Not surprisingly, relations between the landlord and Hazleton did not flourish happily during the Army operation and the second Ebola outbreak. The company vacated the building afterward, and to this day it stands empty.
Peter Jahrling, a whiffer of Ebola who lived to tell about it, is now the principal scientist at USAMRIID. He and Tom Geisbert, following tradition in the naming of new viruses, named the strain they had discovered Reston, after the place where it was first noticed. In conversation, they sometimes refer to it casually as Ebola Reston. One day in his office, Jahrling showed me a photograph of some Ebola-virus particles. They resembled noddles that had been cooked al dente. “Look at this honker. Look at this long sucker here,” Jahrling said, his finger tracing a loop. “It’s Reston—oh, I was about to say it’s Reston, but it isn’t—it’s Zaire. The point is, you can’t easily tell the difference between the two strains by looking. It brings you back to a philosophical question: Why is the Zaire suffer hot for humans? Why isn’t Reston hot for humans, when the strains are so close to each other? The Ebola Reston virus is almost certainly transmitted by some airborne route. Those Hazleton workers who had the virus—I’m pretty sure they got it through the air.”