VirusSource


 * Throughout the book, hints will be given as to the source of the virus. With each reading portion, give your idea of where the virus came from- and the evidence you found in the book that made you think that way. By the end of the book, we should know the source!

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In this first chapter, Charles Monet and one of his woman friends decide to go on a hike up to Mt.Elgon and into Kitum Cave. They find there way in there by following elephant tracks, and as they go further and further, they find more things that could relate to his sickness that started seven days after his New Years trip to Kitum Cave. They came across crystals that were sharp and shiny in the cave, and they found bones sticking out of the ceilins and walls. "Did he run his hand over the stone trees and prick his finger on a crystal?" Then they came across a broken pillar, and a above it were a load of bats, that had sickened the pillar with bat guano. "These bats were insect eaters, and the guano was an ooze of digested insects. Did monet put his hand in the ooze?"

in this second part of the hot zone, we run into Nancy Jaax, who works with a level 4 biohazard (ebola). In the beginning we catch her preparing dinner when she cuts her right palm. the next day she heads to work, preparing herself for an encounter with the recently "down" monkeys. when she enters the ebola room, she has gone through a process of mini-rooms or levels that decontaminate you and your suit. Apparently N. Jaax did not check her suit well before messing with the blood of the contaminated monkey because she was forced to run out of the room in a state of panic for her suit had a tear/ hole which allowed blood to leak all the way to her final layer of glove. lucky for her it did not get into her cut and she thought she was safe. a few days later they find the monkeys that were healthy had become exposed to the deadly virus through the air and died. what will happen to her?

Mr. Yu. G. was a storekeeper in a cotton factory in Nzara that had bats "roosted in the ceiling" of the room near his desk piled with cotton cloth. The bats were not proven to have been infected with Ebola but it was suspected that perhaps insects caught in the cottom fiber were infected or maybe the rats that lived in the facotry were infected. Although Mr. Yu. G. could have been infected somewhere else it is suspicious that two other people that he worked with also became infected with the virus two days after he died.

The Reston is a primate qaurantine unit that houses monkeys from foreign countrys before shipping them out to the U.S. On Oct. 4 1989 they recieved a shipment of monkeys from the Philippines. In this shipment 2 monkey's were already dead but that was normal but once placed into holding cells they slowly begain to die. Alarmed by this Dalgard started to diesect the monkeys to see why they were dying. what he found was suprising, an enlarged spleen he took a peice of the spleen and a sample of mucus and teporarily perserved it.

Peter Jahrling, an expert on viruses at the USAMRIID, was given the sample from the mokeys at Reston. He looked at the sample under the electron microscope with an intern named Tom Geisbert. They first diagnosed the monkeys with simian hemorrhagic fever, a condition that was, "harmless to humans and lethal to monkeys." As they looked some more, they saw that there was something that killed the virus. They concluded that it was psuedomonas, a common bacteria that can wipe out viruses. They were handling this flask with only a level 3 caution. A few days later, Geisbert decided to look at the flask again, and was frightened by what he saw: Marburg. It is not sure what the source of Marburg is, but it has been found in many bats, especially Egyptian Fruit Bats. These bats can be found all throughout Africa, and could have easily come into contact with some of the monkeys at the Reston.