Return to Sanity: Just How Serious Is Ebola? Look at its History

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Just How Serious Is Ebola? Look at its History

Cover of The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

Ebola Reston - In October 1989, the community of Reston, Virginia went about their daily lives not realizing that a serious crisis was developing right in their back yards that would not be entirely resolved until March 1990. It was a serious calamity that could have wiped out the entire population. This dire emergency was described twenty years ago by Richard Preston in his non-fiction book, “The Hot Zone.” The “hot zone” refers to an “area that contains lethal, infectious organisms” also dubbed “hot agent,” an “extremely lethal virus, potentially airborne.” (Richard Preston, The Hot Zone, Random House, New York, 1994, p. 296)

The people in the book are real, two victims’ names have been changed, and the narrative and dialog were masterfully reconstructed from interviews and memories of those who participated in the crises.

Hazelton Research Products, a division of Corning, Inc. was importing and selling lab animals. On October 4, 1989, the monkey house called Reston Primate Quarantine Unit located not far from Leesburg Pike, received a shipment of one hundred crab-eating monkeys (a type of macaque) from the Philippines, caught on the island of Mindanao. Two of the monkeys were dead in their shipping crates. By first of November, 29 of the monkeys were dead, most of them in Room F. The heating and air system had failed so it was assumed the deaths had occurred from ambient conditions. Each night more macaques died. By November 16, a tentative diagnosis was given “simian hemorrhagic fever.”

Thomas Geisbert, an intern at the Institute discovered under his electron microscope the dreaded Ebola virus. Dr. Jahrling tested the virus cultures from the macaques against three known blood serums:

Musoke (test for Marburg virus)
Boniface (test for Ebola Sudan)
Mayinga (test for Ebola Zaire)

The virus cultures glowed brightly against the Mayinga blood serum indicating that the monkeys in the Reston house died of Ebola Zaire strain, the deadliest of all filoviruses (Ebola).

The Institute is short for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) located at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Its “mission is medical defense” with specialty in “drugs, vaccines, and biocontainment.” The Institute’s Army and civilian personnel were instrumental in the containment of the Ebola Reston virus in a Reston, Virginia monkey holding facility.

To contain the spread of Ebola Reston, the mutated strain of Ebola Zaire, the Army chose the bio-hazard operation of killing all the monkeys, bag them, incinerate their carcasses, and chemically clean and fumigate the building with formaldehyde gas. Their mission was to safeguard the population, euthanize the animals humanely (anesthetic, sedative, and a lethal drug), and gather samples for research from liver and spleen in order to identify the strain and how it traveled. The entire operation was done in biohazard Level 4 suits. To a trained eye, the badly liquefied organs and tissues, the red eyes, frozen faces, and slacking muscles left no doubt that the monkeys died of Ebola. By December 7, 1989, four hundred and fifty monkeys were euthanized, some already very sick and some harboring the virus. (pp. 212-213)

Two monkey handlers got sick, one had a heart attack and another one was sent to the Fairfax Hospital with flu-like symptoms and vomiting. For unknown reasons, although both had been exposed to the Ebola virus, neither had contracted Ebola.

After the three-day decontamination, the building was turned back over from the Army custody to the Hazleton Research Products who bought more macaques from the Philippines from the same source in Manila. By middle January 1990, monkeys in Room C started to die with bloody noses. It was Ebola again from the Philippines, not Africa. The monkeys were destroyed and the company vacated the building.

According to Richard Preston, the disaster 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. … Ebola apparently drifted through the building’s air-handling ducts.” (pp. 251-252)