“Did we dodge a bullet?”
“I don’t think we did,” Jahrling said. “The bullet hit us. We were just lucky that the bullet we took was a rubber bullet from a twenty-two rather than a dumdum bullet from a forty-five. My concern is that people are saying, “Whew, we dodged a bullet.’ And the next time they see Ebola in a microscope, they’ll say, ‘Aw, it’s just Reston,’ and they’ll take it outside a containment facility. And we’ll get whacked in the forehead when the stuff turns out not to be Reston but its big sister.”
C.J. Peters eventually left the Army to become the chief of the Special Pathogen Branch at the Centers for Disease Control. Looking back on the Reston event, he said to me one day that was pretty sure Ebola had spread through the air, “I think the pattern of spread that we saw, and the fact that it spread to new rooms, suggest that Ebola aerosols were being generated and were present in the building,” he said. “If you look at pictures of lungs from a monkey with Ebola Zaire, you see that the lungs are fogged with Ebola. Have you seen those pictures?”
“Yes, Nancy Jaax showed them to me.”
“Then you know. You can see Ebola particles clearly in the air spaces of the lung.”
“Did you ever try to see if you could put Ebola Reston into the air and spread it among monkeys that way?” I asked.
“No,” he replied firmly. “I just didn’t think that was a good idea. If anybody had found out that the Army was doing experiments to see if the Ebola virus had adapted to spreading in the respiratory tract, we would have been accused of doing offensive biological warfare—trying to create a doomsday germ. So we elected not to follow it up.”
“That means you don’t really know if Ebola spreads in the air.”
“That’s right. We don’t know. You have to wonder if Ebola virus can do that or not. If it can, that’s about the worst thing you can imagine.”
So the three sisters—Marburg, Ebola Sudan, and Ebola Zaire—have been joined by a fourth sister, Reston. A group of researchers at the Special Pathogens Branch of the C.D.C.—principally Antony Sanchez and Heinz Feldmann—have picked apart the genes of all the filoviruses. They discovered that Zaire and Reston ar so much alike that it’s hard to say how they are different. When I met Anthony Sanchez and asked him about it, he said to me, “I call them kissing cousins. But I can’t put my finger on why Reston apparently doesn’t make us sick. Personally, I wouldn’t feel comfortable handling it without a suit and maximum containment procedures.” Each virus contains seven proteins, four of which are completely unknown. Something slightly different about one of the Reston proteins is a probably the reason the virus didn’t go off in Washington like a bonfire. The Army and C.D.C have never downgraded the safety status of Reston virus. It seems classified as a Level 4 hot agent, and if you want to shake hands with it, you had better wearing a space suit. Safety experts feel that there is not enough evidence, yet, to show that the Reston strain is not an extremely dangerous virus. It may be, in fact, the most dangerous of all the filovirus sisters, because of its seeming ability to travel rather easily through the air, perhaps more easily than the others. A tiny change in its genetic code, and it might turn into a cough and take out the human race.
Why is the Reston virus so much like Ebola Zaire, when Reston supposedly comes from Asia? If the strains come from different continents, they should be quite different from each other. One possibility is that the Reston strain originated in Africa and flew to the Philippines on an airplane not long ago. In other words, Ebola has already entered the net and has been traveling lately. The experts do not doubt that a virus can hop around the world in a matters of days. Perhaps Ebola came out of Africa and landed in Asia a few years back. Perhaps—this is only a guess—Ebola traveled to Asia inside wild African animals. There have been rumors that rain forest have been importing African animals illegally, releasing them into the Philippine jungle, and hunting them. If Ebola lives in African game animals—in leopards or lions or in Cape buffalo—it might have traveled to Philippines that way. This is only a guess. Like all the other thread virus, Ebola Reston hides in a secret place. It seems quite likely, however, that the enter Reston outbreak started with a single monkey in the Philippines. One sick monkey. That monkey was the unknown index case. One monkey started the whole thing. That monkey perhaps picked up four or five particles of Ebola that came from… anyone’s guess.
PART FOUR
Kitum Cave
Highway
1993 August
Camp
The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rainforest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth. Many of them come from tatered 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 thins carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in wave 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 Kyasnur Forst brain virus. HIV—which is very much an emerging virus, because its penetration of the human species is increasing rapidly, with no end in sight. The Semlike Forst agent. Grimean-Congo. Sinbis. O’nyongnyong. Nameless Sao 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 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 balance 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 human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.