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

No one knows why Marburg has a special affinity for the testicles and the
eyes. One man infected his wife with Marburg through sexual intercourse.
Doctors noticed that the Marburg agent had a strange effect on the
brain. "Most of the patients showed a sullen, slight aggressive, or
negativistic behavior," according to the book. "Two patients (had) a
feeling as if they were lying on crumbs." One patient became psychotic,
apparently as a result of brain damage. The patient named Hans O.-V.


file:///G|/rah/Richard%20Preston%20-%20The%20Hot%20Zone.txt (13 of 128) [2/14/2004 12:48:18 AM]
 file:///G|/rah/Richard%20Preston%20-%20The%20Hot%20Zone.txt

showed no signs of mental derangement, and his fever cooled, and he seemed
to be stabilizing, but then suddenly, without warning, he had an acute
fall in blood pressure-he was crashing-and he died. They performed an
autopsy on him, and when they opened his skull, they found a massive,
fatal hemorrhage at the center of the brain. He had bled out into his
brain.
International health authorities were urgently concerned to find
the exact source of the monkeys, in order to pin down where in nature the
Marburg virus lived. It seemed pretty clear that the Marburg virus did
not naturally circulate in monkeys, because it killed them so fast it
could not successfully establish itself in them as a useful host.
Therefore, Marburg lived in some other kin of host-an insect? a rat? a
spider? a reptile? Where, exactly, had the monkeys been trapped? That
place would be the hiding place of the virus. Soon after the outbreak in
Germany, a team of investigators under the auspices of the World Health
Organization flew to Uganda. The team couldn't discover the exact source
of the virus.
There the mystery lingered for many years. Then, in 1982, an
English veterinarian came forward with new eyewitness information about
the Marburg monkeys. I will call this man Mr. Jones (today, he prefers to
remain anonymous). During the summer of 1967, when the virus erupted in
Germany, Mr. Jones was working at a temporary job inspecting monkeys at
the export facility in Entebbe from which the sick Marburg monkeys had
been shipped, while regular veterinary inspector was on leave. This
monkey house, which was run by a rich monkey trader ("a sort of lovable
rogue," according to Mr. Jones) was exporting about thirteen thousand
monkeys a year to Europe. This was a very large number of monkeys, and it
generated big money. The infected shipment was loaded onto an overnight
flight to London, and from there it was flown to Germany-where the virus
broke out of the monkeys and "attempted" to establish itself in the human
population.
After making a number of telephone calls, I finally located Mr.
Jones in a town in England, where today he is working as a veterinary
consultant. He said to me: "All that animals got, before they were
shipped off, was a visual inspection."
"By whom?" I asked.
"By me," he said. "I inspected them to see that they appeared
normal. On occasion, with some of these shipments, one or two animals