The Coming Plague Read Online Free PDF Page A

watched seemingly endless grassy savannas pass beneath them. These were broken up by outcroppings of low, tree-covered alturas hills, and by long winding rivers lined with thin bandas strips of rain forest.
    â€œIt looks just like Florida,” MacKenzie thought. “Kind of like the Everglades.”
    After two more long hours the plane landed in the little town of Magdalena, and MacKenzie couldn’t believe his eyes.
    â€œMy gosh,” he exclaimed, “there must be two hundred people out there, standing around the plane.” The women in the throng were dressed entirely in mourning; the men wore black armbands. The bereaved people of Magdalena had gathered to greet “the experts” who had come to end their epidemic.
    â€œExperts?” MacKenzie muttered, casting an uncomfortable glance at Valverde and Garrón. “Well, I’m it.”
    With the grim entourage around them, the group dodged lumbering oxcarts as it made its way past a scattering of thatch-roofed adobe houses to the town plaza, a large courtyard surrounded by a circular arcade and the homes and stores of Magdalena. A sad, lethargic feeling pervaded everything.
    At Magdalena’s tiny clinic MacKenzie found a dozen patients writhing in pain.
    â€œMy God!” he exclaimed as he watched one after another vomit blood. MacKenzie shuddered, feeling the tremendous onus of his position and cursing the naivete with which he had walked into the situation. It seemed that only yesterday he was doling out antibiotics in a clinic in Sausalito to kids whose frolicking was briefly interrupted by sore throats. What MacKenzie saw on the ward forced him to push aside his pediatrics training and, for the moment, draw upon the lessons in courage and horror he had learned during World War II combat.
    He was told that most of the sick were outsiders from Orobayaya. The
mere name of that distant village sent shivers through the Magdalenistas, who spoke of it with unconcealed fear.
    Soon the lanky MacKenzie, who towered over the Bolivians, was crouched in a dugout canoe making its way by moonlight upriver toward the plagued village. As they glided along MacKenzie kept spotting enormous “logs”—far larger than their canoe—sliding down the riverbanks toward them. The hair on the back of his neck stood up when he realized the “logs” were alligators.
    The next day the group rode forty kilometers on horseback to Orobayaya.
    It was deserted. The six hundred residents had fled days earlier in panic, leaving the village to pigs and chickens that scampered madly about in search of food.
    MacKenzie returned to Magdalena, collected some blood samples from local patients, and headed back to Panama, where he tried to convince MARU director Henry Beye and the NIH bosses in Bethesda that the Bolivian situation warranted further investigation.
    â€œIt’s probably just the flu,” was the consensus from NIH officials.
    â€œIt’s something strange and dangerous,” MacKenzie insisted.
    Both MacKenzie and Johnson thought the Bolivian villagers’ symptoms resembled those brought on by a recently discovered Latin American virus, found near the Junin River in 1953 in Argentina. The Argentine virus was a close cousin of Tacaribe, which caused a disease of bats and rodents in Trinidad, also only recently discovered. While there was no evidence that Tacaribe could infect human beings, Junin was clearly lethal in many cases. In sparsely populated agricultural areas of Argentina’s vast pampas, Junin appeared as if out of nowhere among men working the corn harvests. It too was a human killer that disrupted capillaries, causing people to bleed to death. Nobody was sure how the Argentines got Junin; there was speculation the virus might be airborne.
    No point in taking stupid chances, Johnson thought. Though the NIH had not approved a MARU investigation of the epidemic, he flew to the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick, in