The Hot Zone: Part Two

Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States.

This is to prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.

He had an international reputation as a knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry.

The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and exceedingly sharp canine teeth, able to rip flesh as easily as a honed knife.

Time is supposed to heal all things, but time opened an emotional gangrene in Jerry.

They appeared to have died of heat stress, brought on, he suspected, by the problems with the heating system in the building—but their spleens were weirdly enlarged.

The lesions by this time were showing a pattern of marked splenomegaly [swollen spleen]—strikingly dry on cut surface, enlarged kidneys, and sporadic occurrences of hemorrhage in a variety of organs.

Clinically, the animals showed abrupt anorexia [loss of appetite], and lethargy.

He took a Q-Tip and rubbed it in the dead monkey’s throat, collecting a little bit of mucus, a throat wash.

Dalgard asked Jahrling if he would look at some samples and give a diagnosis, and Jahrling agreed to help.

People around here may be slightly paranoid, but they get a little upset when you send a sample and it drips blood on the carpet.

She ground up a bit of the monkey’s spleen with a mortar and pestle.

At five o’clock on a gray, rainy evening on the edge of winter, as commuters streamed home from Washington, he and another Hazleton veterinarian injected all the monkeys in Room F with lethal doses of anesthetic.

Geisbert poured some of the milky fluid out of the flask into a test tube and then spun it in a centrifuge machine.

When a filovirus begins to amplify itself in a human being, the incubation period is from three to eighteen days, while the number of virus particles climbs steadily in the bloodstream.

At night, he couldn’t sleep on account of the pain, and he would wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and get out of bed, and rummage around the house, looking for something.

Jahrling now had a tentative diagnosis.

The threads push through the cell wall and grow out of the cell, like grass rising from seeded loam.

He experienced what he would later describe as “a major pucker factor” setting in.

(This is a military slang term that refers to a certain tightening sensation in the nether regions of the body, in response to fear.)

“The first question,” he went on, “is what are the chances of laboratory contamination?”

In the Slammer, they become paranoid, convinced that the Army bureaucracy has forgotten about them, has left them to rot. When they come out, they are disoriented.

They were on the verge of a major discovery, and the glory of it perhaps tantalized them.

He wondered if any of the men had cut themselves with a scalpel while performing a dissection of a diseased monkey.

He had been in contact with the blood and secretions of fifty animals.

His tests involved making the samples glow under ultraviolet light.

He went to the freezers, and got out vials of frozen blood serum from three people.

(Presumably reactive against the Kitum Cave strain, which had started with Charles Monet and jumped into Dr. Musoke’s eyes in the black vomit.)

This was not a fun place to be if you happened to have a touch of claustrophobia—sitting in a pitch-black Level 4 closet while wearing a space suit.

He scanned the slides with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth, moving across the microscopic world, looking for a telltale greenish glow.

“We have to be very concerned and very puckered if it is of the same ilk as Ebola.”

“The Army doesn’t have the statutory responsibility to take care of this situation,” General Russell pointed out, “but the Army has the capability.

The C.D.C. doesn’t have the capability. We have the muscle but not the authority. The C.D.C. has the authority but not the muscle.

“It’s a rather rare viral disease that has been responsible for human fatalities in outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan within the past ten or twelve years.”

Something had ravaged these cells. They were blitzed and pock-marked, as if the liver had been carpet bombed.

If the hosts are animals, you kill them and incinerate the carcasses.

Others had gone into terminal comas, and were motionless and bleeding out.

He lay awake, thinking about the needle jabbing into his thumb, thinking about Ebola starting its inevitable replication in his bloodstream.

An angry monkey is like a flying pit bull terrier with five prehensile limbs—these critters can do a job on you.

Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, “Bad bird! Bad bird!”