decon cycle. It would be seven minutes before he could answer any questions.
The main question was whether any blood had penetrated the last glove to the cut. Five or ten Ebola-virus particles suspended in a droplet of blood could easily slip through a pinhole in a surgical glove, and that might be enough to start an explosive infection. This stuff could amplify itself. A pinhole in a glove might not be visible to the eye. She went over to the sink and put her hand under the faucet to rinse off the blood and held there for a while. The water carried the blood down the drain, where the waste water would be cooked in heated tanks.
Then she pulled off the last glove, holding it delicately by the cuff. Her right hand came out caked with baby powder, her fingernails short, no nail polish, no ring, knuckles scarred by a bite form a goat that had nipped her when she was child, and a Band-Aid on the palm.
She saw blood mixed with the baby powder.
Please, please, make it my blood.
Yes—it was her own blood. She had bled around the edges of the Band-Aid. She did not see any monkey on her hand.
She put the last glove under the faucet. The water was running and it filled up the glove. The glove swelled up like a water balloon. She dreaded the sudden appearance of a thread of water squirting from the glove, the telltale of a leak, a sign that her life was over. The glove fattened and held. No leaks.
Suddenly her legs collapsed. She fell against the cinder-block wall and slid down it, feeling as if she had been punched in the stomach. She came to rest on the hatbox, the biohazard box that someone had been using as a chair. Her legs kicked out, and she went limp and leaned back against the wall. That was how Tony Johnson found her when he emerged from the air lock.
The accident report concluded that Major N. Jaax had not been exposed to Ebola virus. Her last glove had remained intact, and since everyone believed that the agent was transmitted through direct contact with blood and bodily fluids, there did not seem to be any way for it to have entered her bloodstream, even though it had breached her space suit. She drove home that night having escaped the Slammer by the skin of her last glove. She had almost caught Ebola from a dead monkey, who had caught t from a young woman named Mayinga, who had caught it from a nun who had crashed and bled out in the jungles of Zaire in years gone by.
She called Jerry that night in Texas. “Guess what? I had this little problem today. I had a near-Ebola experience.” She told him what had happened.
He was appalled. “God-damn it, Nancy! I told you not to get involved with that Ebola virus! That fucking Ebola!” And he went into a ten-minute diatribe about the dangers of doing hot work in a space suit, especially with Ebola.
She remained calm and did not argue with him. She realized he wasn’t angry with her, just scared. She let Jerry run on, and when he had gotten it all out of his system and was starting to taper off, she told him that she felt confident that everything was going to be all right.
Meanwhile, he was surprised at how calm his wife seemed. He would have flown home that night if he had perceived any inkling of distress in her.
The Ebola experiments were not a success in the sense that the drugs had no effect on the virus. All of Gene Johnson’s infected monkeys died no matter what drugs they were given. They all died. The virus absolutely nuked the monkeys. It was a complete slate wiper. The only survivors of the experiment were the two control monkeys—the healthy, uninfected monkeys that lived in cages across the room from the sick monkeys. The control monkeys had not been infected with Ebola, and so, as expected, they had not become sick.
Then, two weeks after the incident with the bloody glove, something frightening happened in the Ebola rooms. The two healthy monkeys developed red eyes and blood noses, and they crashed and bled out.
They had never been deliberately infected with Ebola virus, and they had not come near the sick monkeys. They were separated from the sick monkeys by open floor.
If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person. But Ebola had drifted across a room. It had moved quickly, decisively, and by an unknown route. Most likely the control monkeys inhaled it into their lungs. “It got there somehow,” Nancy Jaax would say to me as she told me the story some years later. “Monkeys spit and throw stuff. And when the caretakers wash the cages down with water hoses, that can create an aerosol of droplets. It probably traveled through the air in aerosolized secretion. That was when I knew that Ebola can travel through the air.”
EBOLA RIVER
1976 Summer—Autumn
One July 6, 1976, five hundred miles northwest of Mount Elgon, in southern Sudan, near the fingered edge of the central-African rain forest, a man who is known to Ebola hunters as Yu. G. went into shock and died with blood running from the orifices of his body. He is referred to only by his initials. Mr. Yu. G. was the first identified case, the index case, in an outbreak of an unknown virus.
Mr. Yu. G. was a storekeeper in a cotton factory in the town of Nzara. The population of Nzara had grown in recent years—the town had experienced, in its own way, the human population explosion that is occurring through the equatorial regions of the earth. The people of that area in southern Sudan are the Zande, a large tribe. The country of the Zande is savanna mixed with riverine forest, beautiful country, where acacia trees cluster along the banks of seasonal rivers. African doves perch in the trees and call their drawn-out calls. The land between the rivers is a sea of elephant grass, which can grow ten feet height. As you head south, toward Zaire, the land rises and forms hills, and the forest begins to spread away from the rivers and thickens into a closed canopy, and you enter the rain forest. The land around the town of Nzara held rich planations of teak and fruit trees and cotton. People were poor, but they worked hard and raised large families and kept to their tribal traditions.
Mr. Yu. G. was a salaried man. He worked at a desk in a room piled with cotton cloth at the back of the factory. Bats roosted in the ceiling of the room near his desk. If the bats were infected with Ebola, no one has been able to prove it. The virus may have entered the cotton factory by some unknown route—perhaps in insects trapped in the cotton fibers, for example, or in rats that lived in the factory. Or, possibly, the virus had nothing to do with the cotton factory, and Mr. Yu. G. was infected somewhere else. He did not go to a hospital, and died on a cot in his family compound. His family gave him a traditional Zande funeral and left his body under a mound of stones in a clearing of elephant grass.
His grave has been visited more than once by doctors from Europe and America, who want to see it and reflect on its meaning, and pay their respects to the index case of what later became known as Ebola Sudan.
He is remembered today as a “quiet, unremarkable man.” No photograph was taken of him during his lifetime, and no one seems to remember what he looked like. He wasn’t well known, even in his hometown.
They say that his brother was tall and slender, so perhaps, he was, too. He passed through the gates of life unnoticed by anyone except his family and a few of his co-workers. He might have made no difference except for the fact what he was a host.
His illness began to copy itself. A few days after he died, two other salaried men who worked at desks near him in the same room broke with bleeding, went into shock, and died with massive hemorrhages from the natural openings of the body. One of the dead men was a popular fellow known as P.G. Unlike the quiet Mr. Yu. G., he had a wide circle of friends, including several mistresses. He spread the agent far and wide in the town. The agent jumped easily from person to person, apparently through touching and sexual contact. It was a fast spreader, and it could live easily in people. It passed through as many as sixteen generations of infection as it jumped from person to person in Sudan. It also killed many of its hosts. While this is not necessarily in the best interest of the virus, if the virus is highly contagious, and can jump fast enough from host to host, then it does not matter, really, what
