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

eventually caught the virus; seven died in pools of blood. The kill rate
of Marburg turned out to be about one in four, which makes Marburg an
extremely lethal agent: even in the best modern hospitals, where the
patients are hooked up to life-support machines, Marburg kills a quarter
of the patients who are infected with it. By contrast, yellow fever,
which is considered a highly lethal virus, kills only about one in twenty
patients once they reach hospital.
Marburg is one of a family of viruses known as the filoviruses.
Marburg was the first filovirus to be discovered. The word filovirus is
Latin and means "thread virus". The filoviruses look alike, as if they
are sisters, and they 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 train 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 comprised Marburg along with two types of 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
fellout 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,
semirotten testicles. One of the worst cases of this appeared in a morgue
attendant who had handled Marburg-infected bodies. The virus also
lingered in the fluid inside the eyeballs of some victims for many months.