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

were injured or had skin leisons." His method was to pick out the
sick-looking ones, which were removed from the shipment and presumably
killed before the remaining healthy-looking animals were loaded onto the
plane. When, a few weeks later, the monkeys started the outbreak in
Germany, Mr. Jones felt terrible. "I was appalled, because I had signed
the export certificate," he said to me. "I feel now that I have the
deaths of these people on my hands. But that feeling suggests I could
have done something about it. There was no way I could have known." He
is right about that: the virus was then unknown to science, and as few as
two or three not-visibly-sick animals could have started the outbreak.
One concludes that the man should not be blamed for anything.
The story becomes more disturbing. He went on: "The sick ones
were being killed, or so I thought." But later he learned that they
weren't being killed. The boss of the company was having the sick monkeys
put in boxes and shipped out to a small island in Lake Victoria, where
they were released. With so many sick monkeys running around it, the
island could have become a focus for monkey viruses. It could have been a
hot island, an isle of plagues. "Then, if this guy was a bit short of
monkeys, he went out to the island and caught a few, unknown to me." Mr.
Jones thinks it is possible that the Marburg agent had established itself
on the hot island, and was circulating among the monkeys there, an that
some of the monkeys which ended up in Germany had actually come from that



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

island. But when the WHO team came later to investigate, "I was told by
my boss to say nothing unless asked." As it turned out, no one asked Mr.
Jones any questions-he says he never met the WHO team. The fact that the
team apparently never spoke with him, the monkey inspector, "was bad
epidemiology but good politics," he remarked to me. If it had been
revealed that the monkey trader was shipped off suspect monkeys collected
on a suspect island, he could have been put out of business, and Uganda
would have lost a source of valuable foreign cash.
Shortly after the Marburg outbreak, Mr. Jones recalled a fact that
began to seem important to him. Between 1962 and 1965 he had been
stationed in eastern Uganda, on the slopes of Mount Elgon, inspecting
cattle for disease. At some time during that period, local chiefs told
him that the people who lived on the north side of the volcano, along the
Greek River, were suffering from a disease that caused bleeding, death,
and "a particular skin rash"-and that monkeys in the area were dying of a
similar disease. Mr. Jones did not pursue the rumors, and was never able
to confirm the nature of the disease. But it seems possible that in the
years preceding the outbreak of Marburg virus in Germany, a hidden
outbreak of the virus occurred on the slopes of Mount Elgon.


MR. JONES'S PERSONAL VISION of the Marburg outbreak reminds me of a