"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

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 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 shipment 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 human
population of the city. This is an example of virus amplification.
The first person known to be infected with Marburg agent was a man
called Klaus F., an employee at 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 virus, held at the University of
Marburg in 1970. In the book, we learn that

The monkey-keeper HEINRICH P. came back from his holiday on August
13th 1967 and did his job of killing monkeys from 14th-23rd. The first
symptoms appeared on August 21st. The laboratory assistant RENATE 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.



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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