The Hot Zone Read online

  PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE.

  YOUR COOPERATION WILL BE

  APPRECIATED.

  NOTE: THIS IS A CASUALTY

  DEPARTMENT.

  EMERGENCY CASES WILL BE

  TAKEN IN PRIORITY.

  YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO WAIT

  FOR SUCH CASES

  BEFORE RECEIVING ATTENTION.

  Monet maintains silence, waiting to receive attention. Suddenly he goes into the last phase—the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has “crashed and bled out.” Or more politely they say that the victim has “gone down.”

  He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit blood and black matter while unconscious. Then comes a sound like a bedsheet being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. He has sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amounts of blood. Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.

  The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the hot agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is “trying” to find a new host.

  JUMPER

  1980 JANUARY 15

  Nurses and aides came running, pushing a gurney along with them, and they lifted Charles Monet onto the gurney and wheeled him into the intensive care unit at Nairobi Hospital. A call for a doctor went out over the loudspeakers: a patient was bleeding in the ICU. A young doctor named Shem Musoke ran to the scene. Dr. Musoke was widely considered to be one of the best young physicians at the hospital, an energetic man with a warm sense of humor, who worked long hours and had a good feel for emergencies. He found Monet lying on the gurney. He had no idea what was wrong with the man, except that he was obviously having some kind of massive hemorrhage. There was no time to try to figure out what had caused it. He was having difficulty breathing—and then his breathing stopped. He had inhaled blood and had had a breathing arrest.

  Dr. Musoke felt for a pulse. It was weak and sluggish. A nurse ran and fetched a laryngoscope, a tube that can be used to open a person’s airway. Dr. Musoke ripped open Monet’s shirt so that he could observe any rise and fall of the chest, and he stood at the head of the gurney and bent over Monet’s face until he was looking directly into his eyes, upside down.

  Monet stared redly at Dr. Musoke, but there was no movement in the eyeballs, and the pupils were dilated. Brain damage: nobody home. His nose was bloody and his mouth was bloody. Dr. Musoke tilted the patient’s head back to open the airway so that he could insert the laryngoscope. He was not wearing rubber gloves. He ran his finger around the patient’s tongue to clear the mouth of debris, sweeping out mucus and blood. His hands became greasy with black curd. The patient smelled of vomit and blood, but this was nothing new to Dr. Musoke, and he concentrated on his work. He leaned down until his face was a few inches away from Monet’s face, and he looked into Monet’s mouth in order to judge the position of the scope. Then he slid the scope over Monet’s tongue and pushed the tongue out of the way so that he could see down the airway past the epiglottis, a dark hole leading inward to the lungs. He pushed the scope into the hole, peering into the instrument. Monet suddenly jerked and thrashed.

  Monet vomited.

  The black vomit blew up around the scope and out of Monet’s mouth. Black-and-red fluid spewed into the air, showering down over Dr. Musoke. It struck him in the eyes. It splattered over his white coat and down his chest, marking him with strings of red slime dappled with dark flecks. It landed in his mouth.

  He repositioned his patient’s head and swept the blood out of the patient’s mouth with his fingers. The blood had covered Dr. Musoke’s hands, wrists, and forearms. It had gone everywhere—all over the gurney, all over Dr. Musoke, all over the floor. The nurses in the intensive care unit couldn’t believe their eyes. Dr. Musoke peered down into the airway and pushed the scope deeper into the lungs. He saw that the airways were bloody.

  Air rasped into the man’s lungs. The patient had begun to breathe again.

  The patient was apparently in shock from loss of blood. He had lost so much blood that he was becoming dehydrated. The blood had come out of practically every opening in his body. There wasn’t enough blood left to maintain circulation, so his heartbeat was very sluggish, and his blood pressure was dropping toward zero. He needed a blood transfusion.

  A nurse brought a bag of whole blood. Dr. Musoke hooked the bag on a stand and inserted the needle into the patient’s arm. There was something wrong with the patient’s veins; his blood poured out around the needle. Dr. Musoke tried again, putting the needle into another place in the patient’s arm and probing for the vein. Failure. More blood poured out. At every place in the patient’s arm where he stuck the needle, the vein broke apart like cooked macaroni and spilled blood, and the blood ran from the punctures down the patient’s arm and wouldn’t coagulate. Clearly his blood was not normal. Dr. Musoke abandoned his efforts to give his patient a blood transfusion for fear that the patient would bleed to death out of the small hole in his arm. The patient continued to bleed from the bowels, and these hemorrhages were now as black as pitch.

  Monet’s coma deepened, and he never regained consciousness. He died in the intensive care unit in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Musoke stayed by his bedside the whole time.

  They had no idea what had killed him. It was an unexplained death. They opened him up for an autopsy and found that his kidneys were destroyed and that his liver was destroyed. It was yellow, and parts of it had liquefied—it looked like the liver of a cadaver. It was as if Monet had become a corpse before his death. Sloughing of the gut, in which the intestinal lining comes off, is another effect that is ordinarily seen in a corpse that is several days old. What, exactly, was the cause of death? It was impossible to say because there were too many possible causes. Everything had gone wrong inside this man, absolutely everything, any one of which could have been fatal: the clotting, the massive hemorrhages, the liver turned into pudding, the intestines full of blood. Lacking words, categories, or language to describe what had happened, they called it, finally, a case of “fulminating liver failure.” His remains were placed in a waterproof bag and, according to one account, were buried locally. When I visited Nairobi, years later, no one remembered where the grave was.

  1980 JANUARY 24

  Nine days after the patient vomited into Dr. Shem Musoke’s eyes and mouth, Musoke developed an aching sensation in his back. He was not prone to backaches—really, he had never had a serious backache—but he was approaching thirty, and it occurred to him that he was getting into the time of life when some men begin to get bad backs. He had been driving himself hard these past few weeks. He had been up all night with a patient who had had heart problems, and then, the following night, he had been up most of the night with that Frenchman with hemorrhages who had come from somewhere upcountry. So he had been going nonstop for days without sleep. He hadn’t thought much about the vomiting incident, and when the ache began to spread through his body, he still didn’t think about it. Then, when he looked in a mirror, he noticed that his eyes were turning red.

  Red eyes—he began to wonder if he had malaria. He had a fever now, so certainly he had some kind of infection. The backache had spread until all the muscles in his body ached badly. He started taking malaria pills, but they didn’t do any good, so he asked one of the nurses to give him an injection of an antimalarial drug.

&n
bsp; The nurse gave it to him in the muscle of his arm. The pain of the injection was very, very bad. He had never felt such pain from a shot; it was abnormal and memorable. He wondered why a simple shot would give him this kind of pain. Then he developed abdominal pain, and that made him think that he might have typhoid fever, so he gave himself a course of antibiotic pills, but that had no effect on his illness. Meanwhile, his patients needed him, and he continued to work at the hospital. The pain in his stomach and in his muscles grew unbearable, and he developed jaundice.

  Unable to diagnose himself, in severe pain, and unable to continue with his work, he presented himself to Dr. Antonia Bagshawe, a physician at Nairobi Hospital. She examined him, observed his fever, his red eyes, his jaundice, his abdominal pain, and came up with nothing definite, but wondered if he had gallstones or a liver abscess. A gall-bladder attack or a liver abscess could cause fever and jaundice and abdominal pain—the red eyes she could not explain—and she ordered an ultrasound examination of his liver. She studied the images of his liver and saw that it was enlarged, but, other than that, she could see nothing unusual. By this time, he was very sick, and they put him in a private room with nurses attending him around the clock. His face set itself into an expressionless mask.

  This possible gallstone attack could be fatal. Dr. Bagshawe recommended that Dr. Musoke have exploratory surgery. He was opened up in the main operating theater at Nairobi Hospital by a team of surgeons headed by Dr. Imre Lofler. They made an incision over his liver and pulled back the abdominal muscles. What they found inside Musoke was eerie and disturbing, and they could not explain it. His liver was swollen and red and did not look healthy, but they could not find any sign of gallstones. Meanwhile, he would not stop bleeding. Any surgical procedure will cut through blood vessels, and the cut vessels will ooze for a while and then clot up, or if the oozing continues, the surgeon will put dabs of gel foam on them to stop the bleeding. Musoke’s blood vessels would not stop oozing—his blood would not clot. It was as if he had become a hemophiliac. They dabbed gel foam all over his liver, and the blood came through the foam. He leaked blood like a sponge. They had to suction off a lot of blood from the incision, but as they pumped it out, the incision filled up again. It was like digging a hole below the water table: it fills up as fast as you pump it out. One of the surgeons would later tell people that the team had been “up to the elbows in blood.” They cut a wedge out of his liver—a liver biopsy—and dropped the wedge into a bottle of pickling fluid and closed up Musoke as quickly as they could.

  He deteriorated rapidly after the surgery, and his kidneys began to fail. He appeared to be dying. At that time, Antonia Bagshawe, his physician, had to travel abroad, and he came under the care of a doctor named David Silverstein. The prospect of kidney failure and dialysis for Dr. Musoke created a climate of emergency at the hospital—he was well liked by his colleagues, and they didn’t want to lose him. Silverstein began to suspect that Musoke was suffering from an unusual virus. He collected some blood from his patient and drew off the serum, which is a clear, golden-colored liquid that remains when the red cells are removed from the blood. He sent some tubes of frozen serum to laboratories for testing—to the National Institute of Virology in Sandringham, South Africa, and to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. Then he waited for results.

  DIAGNOSIS

  David Silverstein lives in Nairobi, but he owns a house near Washington, D.C. One day in the summer recently, when he was visiting the United States to tend to some business, I met him in a coffee shop in a shopping mall not far from his home. We sat at a small table, and he told me about the Monet and Musoke cases. Silverstein is a slender, short man in his late forties, with a mustache and glasses, and he has an alert, quick gaze. Although he is an American, his voice carries a hint of a Swahili accent. On the day that I met him, he was dressed in a denim jacket and blue jeans, and he was nicely tanned, looking fit and relaxed. He is a pilot, and he flies his own plane. He has the largest private medical practice in East Africa, and it has made him a famous figure in Nairobi. He is the personal physician of Daniel arap Moi, the president of Kenya, and he travels with President Moi when Moi goes abroad. He treats all the important people in East Africa: the corrupt politicians, the actors and actresses who get sick on safari, the decayed English-African nobility. He traveled at the side of Diana, Lady Delamere, as her personal physician when she was growing old, to monitor her blood pressure and heartbeat (she wanted to carry on with her beloved sport of deep-sea fishing off the Kenya coast, although she had a heart condition), and he was also Beryl Markham’s doctor. Markham, the author of West with the Night, a memoir of her years as an aviator in East Africa, used to hang out at the Nairobi Aero Club, where she had a reputation for being a slam-bang, two-fisted drinker. (“She was a well-pickled old lady by the time I came to know her.”) His patient Dr. Musoke has himself become a celebrity, in the annals of disease. “I was treating Dr. Musoke with supportive care,” Silverstein said to me. “That was all I could do. I tried to give him nutrition, and I tried to lower his fevers when they were high. I was basically taking care of somebody without a game plan.”

  One night, at two o’clock in the morning, Silverstein’s telephone rang at his home in Nairobi. It was an American researcher stationed in Kenya calling him to report that the South Africans had found something very queer in Musoke’s blood: “He’s positive for Marburg virus. This is really serious. We don’t know much about Marburg.”

  Silverstein had never heard of Marburg virus. “After the phone call, I could not get back to sleep,” he said to me. “I had kind of a waking dream about it, wondering what Marburg was.” He lay in bed, thinking about the sufferings of his friend and colleague Dr. Musoke, fearful of what sort of organism had gotten loose among the medical staff at the hospital. He kept hearing the voice saying, “We don’t know much about Marburg.” Unable to sleep, he finally got dressed and drove to the hospital, arriving at his office before dawn. He found a medical textbook and looked up Marburg virus.

  The entry was brief. Marburg is an African organism, but it has a German name. Viruses are named for the place where they are first discovered. Marburg is an old city in central Germany, surrounded by forests and meadows, where factories nestle in green valleys. The virus erupted there in 1967, in a factory called the Behring Works, which produced vaccines using kidney cells from African green monkeys. The Behring Works regularly imported monkeys from Uganda. The virus came to Germany hidden somewhere in a series of air shipments of monkeys totaling five or six hundred animals. As few as two or three of the animals were incubating the virus. They were probably not even visibly sick. At any rate, shortly after they arrived at the Behring Works, the virus began to spread among them, and a few of them crashed and bled out. Soon afterward, the Marburg agent jumped species and suddenly emerged in the human population of the city. This is an example of virus amplification.

  The first person known to be infected with the Marburg agent was a man called Klaus F., an employee at the Behring Works vaccine factory who fed the monkeys and washed their cages. He broke with the virus on August 8, 1967, and died two weeks later. So little is known about the Marburg agent that only one book has been published about it, a collection of papers presented at a symposium on the virus, held at the University of Marburg in 1970. In the book, we learn that

  The monkey-keeper HEINRICH P. came back from his holiday on August 13th 1967 and did his job of killing monkeys from the 14th–23rd. The first symptoms appeared on August 21st.

  The laboratory assistant RENATE L. broke a test-tube that was to be sterilized, which had contained infected material, on August 28th, and fell ill on September 4th 1967.

  And so on. The victims developed headaches at about day seven after their exposure and went downhill from there, with raging fevers, clotting, spurts of blood, and terminal shock. For a few days in Marburg, doctors in the city thought the world was coming to an end. Thirty-one people eventually c
aught the virus; seven died in pools of blood. The kill rate of Marburg turned out to be about one in four, which makes Marburg an extremely lethal agent: even in the best modern hospitals, where the patients are hooked up to life-support machines, Marburg kills a quarter of the patients who are infected with it. By contrast, yellow fever, which is considered a highly lethal virus, kills only about one in twenty patients once they reach a hospital.

  Marburg is one of a family of viruses known as the filoviruses. Marburg was the first filovirus to be discovered. The word filovirus is Latin and means “thread virus.” The filoviruses look alike, as if they are sisters, and they resemble no other virus on earth. While most viruses are ball-shaped particles that look like peppercorns, the thread viruses have been compared to strands of tangled rope, to hair, to worms, to snakes. When they appear in a great flooding mess, as they so often do when they have destroyed a victim, they look like a tub of spaghetti that has been dumped on the floor. Marburg particles sometimes roll up into loops. The loops resemble Cheerios. Marburg is the only ring-shaped virus known.

  In Germany, the effects of Marburg virus on the brain were particularly frightening, and resembled the effects of rabies: the virus somehow damaged the central nervous system and could destroy the brain, as does rabies. The Marburg particles also looked rather like rabies particles. The rabies-virus particle is shaped like a bullet. If you stretch out a bullet, it begins to look like a length of rope, and if you coil the rope into a loop, it becomes a ring, like Marburg. Thinking that Marburg might be related to rabies, they called it stretched rabies. Later it became clear that Marburg belongs to its own family.

  Not long after Charles Monet died, it was established that the family of filoviruses comprised Marburg along with two types of a virus called Ebola. The Ebolas were named Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Marburg was the mildest of the three filovirus sisters. The worst of them was Ebola Zaire. The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.