“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 employeeat 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 H EINRICH 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 R ENATE 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 caught 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
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 employeeat 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 H EINRICH 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 R ENATE 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 caught 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
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