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

outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural
laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation
of HIV. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey
trade? Did AIDS come from an island in Lake Victoria? A hot island? Who
knows. When you begin probing into the origins of AIDS and Marburg, the
light fails and things go dark, but you sense hidden connections. Both
viruses seem part of a pattern.


WHEN HE LEARNED what Marburg virus does to human being, Dr. David
Silverstein persuaded the Kenyan health authorities to shut down Nairobi
Hospital. For a week, patients who arrived at the doors were turned away,
while sixty seven people were quarantined inside the hospital, most
medical staff. They included the doctor who had done autopsy on Monet,
nurses who had attended Monet or Dr. Musoke, the surgeons who had operated
on Musoke, and aides and technicians who had handled any secretions from
either Monet or Musoke. It turned out that a large part of the hospital's
staff had direct contact with either Monet or Musoke or with blood samples
and fluids that came from the two patients. The surgeons who had operated
on Musoke, remembering only too well that they had been "up to the elbows
in blood", sweated in quarantine for two weeks while they wondered if they
were going to break with Marburg. A single human virus bomb had walked
into the Casualty waiting room and exploded there, and the event had put
the hospital out of business. Charles Monet had been an Exocet missile
that stuck the hospital below the water line.
Dr. Shem Musoke survived his encounter with a hot agent. Ten days
after he fell sick, the doctors noticed a change for the better. Instead
of merely lying in bed in a passive state, he became disoriented and angry
and refused to take medicine. One day, a nurse was trying to turn him
over in bed, and he waved his fist at her and cried, "I have a stick, and
I will beat you." It was around that time that he began to get better,
and after many days his fever subsided and his eyes cleared; his mind and
personality came back, and he recovered slowly but completely. Today he
is one of the leading physicians at Nairobi Hospital, where he practices
as a member of David Silverstein's group. One day I interviewed him, and
he said to me that he has almost no memory of the weeks he was infected in
Marburg. "I only remember bits and pieces," he said. "I remember having
major confusion. I remember, before my surgery, that I walked out of my
room with my IV drip hanging out of me. I don't remember much of the
pain. The only pain I can talk about is the muscle ache and the
lower-back ache. And I remember him throwing up on me." Nobody else at
the hospital developed a proven case of Marburg-virus disease.
When a virus is trying, so to speak, to crash into the human
species, the warning sign may be a spattering of breaks at different times
and places. These are microbreaks. What had happened at Nairobi Hospital
was an isolated emergence, a microbreak of a rain-forest virus with
unknown potential to start an explosive chain of lethal transmission in
the human race.
Tubese of Dr. Musoke's blood went to laboratories around the world
so that they could have samples of living Marburg for their collections of