Chapter 34 Chapter 33 Monkey Expedition

Late March 1990.All the paperwork was ready and Joe had been transferred to the HIV/AIDS department.According to the arrangement, Joe will move to Geneva with Jonathan in May.Mann rendezvous, I continued to keep in touch with him, to get his opinion, no one else at the CDC really understood the field of hemorrhagic fever.Although our technicians are competent, the director of the viral disease department is new and has a disadvantage in his job. He has no background in medicine and epidemiology. For this reason, he promoted an interim head to The head of the branch, and this person has no idea what hemorrhagic fever is, and has never dabbled in level 4 viruses.

There is a lot of work to be done and I am fully committed.The Reston outbreak produced a large number of blood samples, mostly monkey serum.It seems that everyone who owns or experiments with monkeys is concerned about Ebola infection.We didn't know there were so many monkeys around, and we stopped conducting serum surveys in monkey labs across the United States.Usually serosurveys are done to assess the prevalence of a particular infection in order to show how many of the population are infected.This time, it was to investigate the infection in the monkey population.We tried to use this method to determine how many monkeys had antibodies to Ebola virus, which would indicate how many monkeys had been infected.This way we can determine if it is a normal virus or not.

But we ran into a technical hurdle, the antibody test we were using was designed for Ebola in 1976 when there was an outbreak, and it worked well in an outbreak because it was being tested on newly infected individuals, Individuals have high antibody levels post-illness.Unfortunately, the same test was less definitive on samples taken from larger groups (human or monkey) because there was no recent infection and there was no apparent history of Ebola.Carl.Johnson tried to evaluate the original experiment by experimenting with Indians who had come to Sambras from Central America.He found that 2 percent had antibodies to Ebola, and other researchers later tested the sera of Native Americans in Alaska and found the same rate positive.But what these results mean is uncertain, and no one really knows what to do with them.

The lack of identity is a hallmark of Ebola virus.Marburg virus does not appear to present the same problem to researchers.The person who came closest to this answer was Tom M. of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.Zesk, he did a fairly complicated experiment based on the Eliza test system, which is also an improvement on the immunofluorescence test method.In April 1990, I suggested that the interim division chief should refer Tom's test to the CDC, since that chief was in charge of the serum biology test, but it was not accepted. We experiment with other test methods.Like Western blots for testing for AIDS, but nothing came of it.As a result, we suddenly found that we were so busy working with monkey sera that we hadn't tested them with a well-defined and evaluated system.And the detection process is incredibly repetitive and tedious work.It takes a lot of experience and patience to get believable results, and that's just experimentation.Among those of us who study monkeys, Chuka.Perez spent a lot of time experimenting.About 10 percent of the several hundred monkey blood samples we received showed a reaction to the Ebola virus antigen, although not very strongly.

To understand the significance of these low-level responses, we decided to look more closely at the origin of these sera.Most of them are macaques, the same species as Reston's monkeys.Most are from the Philippines or Indonesia.But there are macaques everywhere in Asia.They often appear in the wilderness, and they can often be seen in tourist areas. They boldly ask tourists for food.Sometimes they are charming, but they can also lose their temper and wreak havoc. The mysterious new filovirus (and not just its antibodies) emerged only in monkeys housed alone and transported in Manila.Why did healthy monkeys from other regions develop antibodies to the virus?This is so puzzling.

I double checked the data to see where most of the infected monkeys came from.The results were surprising.It turns out that the highest rate of antibody positivity did not occur in monkeys from the Philippines, they came from Indonesia. I connected with an older Indonesian virologist whom I had met while studying dengue in Thailand.He and I discussed Indonesian contacts with U.S. embassy officials in Jakarta, and I had the privilege of working with the U.S. Navy’s virology unit in the Indonesian capital.Wild monkey exports are a major contributor to the Indonesian economy.The government's concern is understandable.We were formally invited to go to Indonesia to see if we could find the source of the filovirus.

In May 1990, Steve and IOstrov went to Indonesia together.At this time, Steve was in his early thirties and already accomplished at the Centers for Disease Control.Much of his work is with the Diarrheal Diseases Division of the Bacterial Diseases Division, although he has reservations about viruses.He said he didn't believe them because he couldn't see them.Steve is a great partner.He is shrewd.He quickly learned enough Indonesian to recognize useful epidemiological markers.For example, he can recognize the marks on the door by simple and convenient methods.Say it's a restaurant that sells monkey meat, which is considered delicious in Asia as in Africa.

We were received in Jakarta by Jerry Jerry, a virologist from the British Navy Department.Jennings' reception.Jerry was a tall, likable man who was working in Java on an epidemic of dengue virus infection.The Navy put us up in a nice hotel, but we didn't have time to enjoy it in the room.Jakarta's traffic problems dwarf America's.We had to leave the hotel at six o'clock in the morning and promise to be back by four o'clock in the afternoon.In order to have a car to ride.The working hours of the laboratory are also formulated accordingly. Working with Jerry, we began a survey of monkeys at four monkey breeding facilities in Jakarta.It is said that most of the monkeys come from the island of Sumatra, which is to the north of the main island of Java, where Jakarta is located.Outwardly, the monkeys we examined were healthy and well cared for.However, we still found an omission.The people there told us that when the caretakers found a sick monkey, they mixed it with other sick monkeys and put it in a big cage.Of course, these monkeys could have had very different diseases.These big cages hold twenty to thirty monkeys, and we don't think that's a good idea.It is likely that one infected monkey would pass the virus on to all the other monkeys, especially if they were already weakened by the disease (this is how Reston's monkeys got both simian hemorrhagic fever and Ebola). ? We don't know).Monkeys are precious and cannot be lost easily, so once the monkeys in the cage have survived the disease, they are transported away with the healthy monkeys.But the surviving monkey may still be contagious, and thus have a chance of infecting the whole group of monkeys in the same shipment.

We still don't know if there are monkeys with Ebola-like viruses in Indonesia.We guessed that such a disease would be the same as what we saw in Reston.Since the monkeys in Reston have been infected with simian hemorrhagic fever, we're not entirely sure what virus we're looking for, we just know that some of the monkeys there have tested positive for Ebola, suggesting that those monkeys may have been exposed to filovirus .But in Jakarta, we only saw healthy monkeys.If we're going to find out, we're going to track down the monkey's habitat, which means we're going to take a trip to Sumatra.

At the Naval Laboratory in Jakarta, we conducted a week-long inspection of the monkey laboratory and the serum used in the experiment.We are ready to go on an expedition.That night we boarded the ferry to Sumatra and passed through the Krakatoa reservation in the dark.We drove from the port to Bambung and checked into a hotel.From there it overlooks the bay.The scenery is beautiful, but we still don't have time to sit and enjoy it.We had a quick breakfast and went to the local health department to find out what was going on with the monkey lab and eventually find out where the monkeys came from.We have two pressing questions, have any of the monkeys in the forest died of suspected Ebola infection?Was the monkey catcher infected?

Officials from the health department sent us a guide to show us the way into the mountain.After a short rest, we headed for the jungle along a narrow path that was heavily trafficked.The passage is mostly jungle and palm trees.We stopped now and then along the way to ask people if they had heard any particularly interesting stories about monkeys.People in Jakarta have told us about monkey catchers.Apparently they belonged to a separate tribe in Java.We don't get much information from them because the informants say that the tribe is tight-lipped.They have special magical powers and can communicate with monkeys.According to legend, at night they would go to the tree where the monkeys slept and talk to them.Talk to the magic words that only monkeys understand, tell the monkeys to give up their shelter on the top of the tree, and then the monkey catcher will spread a net under the tree, and then leave. Climb down from the waiting tree.But it was discovered that it was covered by a net.Sounds funny, but we think it's likely that the monkey catchers lured the monkeys down with food. This jungle trek was the longest and hardest I can remember.The first night, a sleepless night, had to trek for twenty-four hours on the dreaded road before finding our first destination, the monkey's camp.The monkey catchers sleep in small huts made of logs, bamboo and banana leaves, which are supported on the ground by stakes.They were happy to show us their new monkeys, curled up in their bamboo cages.Among them there is a mother monkey and her baby.We are touched by the tenderness and kindness shown by the mother monkey to the baby monkey snuggling on her chest.We later heard that the baby monkey died on the way to capture Pong.Only the strongest monkeys will survive the journey to Jakarta to reach the city on the other side of the Pacific. The whole monkey trade pissed me off and I hate to see monkeys in such dire conditions.Whenever I see these animals, I feel like I understand what the slave trade is all about. Jerry and I took blood samples from the monkey trappers while Steve brought an interpreter to talk to them.They told us that if we did find out where the main monkey catchers lived, we'd have to go north.It's a long walk on dirt roads and through a large sugar cane field. Four hours later we arrived at the campsite, which abuts the settlement of one of the monkey catchers on the island.When we came to the camp, the monkey catchers suddenly appeared beside us.There are not many of them.It was dark and we could only see faces illuminated by our lamps.It was a truly surreal sight, a Caravaggio painting, and the monkey hunters were strange and startled to see us, but in the end they were very cooperative, despite the tight-lipped we'd heard about them. We repeated what we did when we met the first monkey hunters, trying to do it as well as we could because the only lighting was the overhead light on our truck.We brought up the monkey thing again.Did they know of any monkeys who got sick or died?Have you ever found a dead monkey?Is anyone known who died of high fever and bleeding?Time and time again the answer is no.After we finished asking questions, they faded into the night again, just as they had suddenly appeared.We seem to be in a dream. In the time available, we have nothing more to learn.The only thing is to drive back to the hotel.We made it back around four in the morning and slept for a few hours.After waking up, I adjusted to the light for a while, and saw a Javanese batik garment that I was wearing the day before that I really liked. It was bought in Thailand a long time ago and worn on my many trips to Africa. for several years.After twenty-four hours in the Sumatran jungle, the dress was in tatters.I threw it in the trash. The next day, we returned to Jakarta to start testing serum collected from the amazing monkey catcher.All blood samples were negative.Not even a single low-level suspicious positive.Despite the urgency of the situation, limited funds, and few samples, we are doing our best.We did not find that hemorrhagic fever, possibly from wild monkeys, posed a significant threat to Indonesians.If wild monkeys were infected with anything like Ebola, they were not found in monkey catchers and transporters.These are the people who had the most direct contact with monkeys.Most importantly, we found no filovirus-like things in monkeys. Our conclusions pleased the Indonesian government quite a bit.We concluded that the low-level antibody response to Ebola virus in monkeys does not pose any danger to humans, and this is also true for monkeys in Indonesia. Back in Atlanta, I still had two serious scientific questions unanswered.One is to find out whether the new Asian filovirus has real disease-causing potential, and the other is to immediately determine whether it is safe to work with monkeys that have antibodies to Ebola.Will the sick monkeys get rid of the virus once they recover?Is it possible for the virus to persist?Clearly, this is the concern of veterinarians, zookeepers and researchers with new filoviruses.I bring up the second question because a lot of veterinarians asked me about the precautions we put in place when they found monkeys with Ebola antibodies.This is a normal fear-based response, and it can ruin the monkey.I answered a veterinarian's questions over and over again.He said: Am I really going to kill my monkey?They are very good animals and we are doing a very important and very expensive medical trial.We always advise them to leave the monkeys alone, carry on with the experiments, and don't worry if they don't get sick.If the monkeys are healthy, even having antibodies may not necessarily cause infection or pose a threat of infection. We need a clear, public profile.I went to our group and Bobby.brown.He is a massive man.With a penchant for striped ties and embossed leather boots, he's the perfect Texan in the casting department's eyes.We struggled a lot to find him an oversized space suit.I suggest an experiment with Asian macaques and some African green monkeys.Like the macaque, the African green monkey is abundant and considered a good pet.We tested 32 monkeys, including 16 African monkeys and 16 Asian monkeys, both of which were infected with African and Asian viruses.The Asian virus we used came from Reston, passed through Peter.Jalin's purification treatment.So we all believe that the virus does not contain simian hemorrhagic fever virus (we did our own experiments to confirm this).As we expected, the African virus was fatal to almost all monkeys.On the other hand, the Asian virus can certainly make monkeys sick, but the number of dead monkeys is much smaller than that of the former, and the Asian virus has a slow onset and a mild onset.Most of the monkeys infected with the Asian strain recovered after about a month.Moreover, compared with Asian monkeys, African monkeys are more resistant to Asian viruses, and almost all green monkeys survived. It now seems plausible that simian hemorrhagic fever was responsible for more of Reston's monkey deaths than filoviruses alone.It could also be that the two infections together caused more severe disease and more deaths.Now we can say with certainty that the Asian filovirus is milder in monkeys than in Africa, and that the virus is not present in monkeys that have recovered from acute infection.We can also assure the public that Asian viruses do not cause disease in humans.We spent almost two years observing the surviving monkeys, performing depletion tests on them to see if we could find any trace of the virus in these monkeys.We found nothing.Although the monkeys continued to have high levels of antibodies, they posed no danger to other animals or their handlers. One last thing to settle, we don't know if there will be an Ebola vaccine. If we want to make a safe Ebola virus, we need to know whether infection with active filoviruses prevents secondary infection.It would be pointless for us to put all the work into developing a genetically engineered vaccine if we can't protect the people who use it.Ebola virus does not seem to produce neutral antibodies in survivors, which prevent Ebola virus from infecting new cells. It occurred to me that the Reston filovirus might be used as an experimental live vaccine for Ebola virus in monkeys.In theory, it's very possible.But in practice, and based on our limited knowledge, developing a vaccine this way is simply risky. As an experiment, I went ahead and tested two monkeys infected with the Reston filovirus to see if their exposure to the virus also protected them from the deadly Saipora virus.I gave two monkeys considerable doses, greater than would be expected in a natural infection. The results were mixed: One monkey had no infection or even a fever, while a second died of Ebola.In retrospect, the experiment did achieve something that had never been done before: First, it protected a monkey that had been injected with a lethal dose of the Saipora virus.Then I gave up on monkey research.I love them too much to have the heart to hurt them. As we wrap up this work, another virus awaits us.This is the one we've studied before, and it's more unique than Ebola.It's time for it to reveal itself more.We're getting closer to dealing with Congo hemorrhagic fever in Crimea.