The Hot Zone Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 comprisedMarburg 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.
    Marburg virus (the gentle sister) affects humans somewhat like nuclear radiation, damaging virtually all of the tissues in their bodies. It attacks with particular ferocity the internal organs, connective tissue, intestines, and skin. In Germany, all the survivors lost their hair—they went bald or partly bald. Their hair died at the roots and fell out in clumps, as if they had received radiation burns. Hemorrhage occurred from all orifices of the body. I have seen a photograph of one of the men who died of Marburg, taken in the hours before his death. He is lying in bed without any clothing on his upper body. His face is expressionless. His chest, arms, and face are speckled with blotches and bruises, and droplets of blood stand on his nipples.
    During the survivors’ recovery period, the skin peeled off their faces, hands, feet, and genitals. Some of the men suffered from blown up, inflamed, semirotten testicles. One of the worst cases of this testicular infection appeared in a morgue attendant who had handled Marburg-infected bodies and who himself came down with Marburg, having caught it from the cadavers. Thevirus also lingered in the fluid inside the eyeballs of some victims for many months. No one knows why Marburg has a special affinity for the testicles and the eyes. One man infected his wife with Marburg through sexual intercourse.
    Doctors noticed that the Marburg agent had a strange effect on the brain. “Most of the patients showed a sullen, slightly aggressive, or negativistic behavior,” according to the book. “Two patients [had] a feeling as if they were lying on crumbs.” One patient became psychotic, apparently as a result of brain damage. The patient called Hans O.-V. showed no signs of mental derangement, and his fever cooled, and he seemed to be stabilizing, but then suddenly, without warning, he had an acute fall in blood pressure—he was crashing—and he died. They performed an autopsy on him, and when they opened his skull, they found a massive, fatal hemorrhage at the center of the brain. He had “bled out” into his brain.
    International health authorities were urgently concerned to find the exact source of the monkeys, in order to pin down where in nature the Marburg virus lived. It seemed pretty clear that the Marburg virus did not naturally circulate in monkeys, because it killed them so fast it could not successfully establish