AIDS is arguably the most 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 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 rainforest animal and then to contemplate the idea that a virus that moved from chimps is suddenly not endangered at all. You could say that rainforest 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 injection, and a person who dies of HIV is usually infected with multiple strains, which have all arisen spontaneously 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 rat leaving a ship.
I suspect the 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. AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest. It is only the first act of the revenge.
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 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. For 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 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 shred 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 as 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 dead whispered in the shadows.
I couldn’t see through the tangled vines into the former hot zone. It was like looking into a jungle. 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 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 color, fed, and subsided into the forest. It will be back.