A MAN DOWN
As Dan Dalgard watched the man spill his stomach out onto the lawn, he felt, in his words, “scared shitless”. Now, perhaps for the first time, the absolute horror of the crisis at the primate building washed over him. Milton Frantig was doubled over, gasping and choking. When his vomiting subsides, Dalgard helped him to his feet, took him indoors, and made him lie down on a couch. Two employees were now sick—Jarvis Purdy was still in the hospital, recovering from a heart attack. Milton Frantig was fifty years old. He had a chonic, hacking cough, although he didn’t smoke. He had been working with monkeys and with Dalgard at Hazleton for more than twenty-five years. Dalgard knew the man well and liked him. Dalgard felt shaken, sick with fear and guilt. Maybe I should have evacuated the building last week. Did I put the interests of the monkeys ahead of the interest of the human beings?
Milton Frantig was pale and shaky, and felt faint. He developed the dry heaves. Dalgard found a plastic bucket for him. Between heaves, interrupted by coughing speels, Frantig apologized for leaving the building while wearing a jump suit. He said he had just been putting on his respirator to go inside a monkey room when he began to feel sick to his stomach. Perhaps the bad smell in the building had nauseated him, because the monkey room weren’t cleaned as regularly as usual. He could feel he was about to vomit, and he couldn’t find a bucket or anything to throw up into, and it was coming on so fast that he couldn’t get to the rest room, so he had run outdoors.
Dalgard wanted to take Frantig’s temperature, but nobody could find a thermometer that hadn’t been used rectally on monkeys. He sent Bill Volt to a drugstore to buy one. When he returned, they discovered that Frantig had a fever of a hundred and one. Bill Volt hovered in the room, almost shaking with fear. Volt was not doing well —“almost spastic in his terror,” Dalgard would later recall, but it wasn’t any different from the way Dalgard felt.
Milton Frantig remained the calmest person in the room. Unlike Dalgard and Volt, he did not seem afraid. He was a devout Christian, comfortable with telling people that he had been saved. If the lord saw fit to take him home with a monkey disease, he was ready. He prayed a little, remembering his favorite passages in the Bible, and his dry heaves subsided. Soon he was resting quietly on the couch and said he felt a little better.
“I want you to stay where you are,” Dalgard said to him. “Don’t leave the building.” He got into his car and drove as fast as he could to the Hazleton Washington offices on Leesburg Pike. The drive didn’t take long, and by the time he got there, he had made up his mind: the monkey facility had to be evacuated. Immediately.
There had been four workers employed in the building, and two of them were now going to be in the hospital. One man had heart problems, and now the other had a fever with vomiting. From what Dalgard knew about Ebola virus, either of these illnesses could be signs of infection. They had shopped at malls and visited friends and eaten in restaurants. Dalgard thought they were probably having sexual intercourse with their wives. He didn’t even want to think about the consequences.
When he arrived at Hazleton Washington, he went directly to the office of the general manager. He intended to brief him about the situation and get his approval to evacuate the monkey house. “We’ve got two guys who are sick,” Dalgard said to him. He began to describe what had happened, and he started crying. He couldn’t control it. He broke down and wept. Trying to pull himself together, he said, “I recommend that—the entire operation—we close it down and turn it over to the Army. We’ve had this god-damned disease since October, we haven’t gotten injured, and all of a sudden we’ve got two guys sick, one in the hospital, one who’s going there. I kept on thinking that if there was a real human risk, we would have seen something by now. We’ve played with fire for too long.”
The general manager sympathized with Dalgard and agreed with him that the monkey facility ought to be evacuated and shut down. Then, holding back his tears, Dalgard hurried to his own office, where he found a group of officials from C.D.C. waiting for him. He felt as if the pressure would never let up. The C.D.C. people had arrived at Hazleton to begin surveillance of all employees who had been exposed to the virus. Dalgard told them what had just happened at the monkey house, that a man had gone down with vomiting. He said, “I have recommended that the facility be evacuated. I feel that the building and the monkeys should be turned over to the people from USAMRIID, who have the equipment and personnel to handle it safely.”
The C.D.C. people listened and did not disagree.
Then there was the question of what to do with Milton Frantig, who was still lying on the couch under orders from Dalgard not to move. Since the C.D.C. was in charge of the human aspects of the outbreak, the C.D.C. was in charge of Frantig—and the C.D.C. wanted him taken to Fairfax Hospital, inside the Washington Beltway.
It was now nine-twenty in the morning. Dalgard sat in his office and sweated it out, managing the crisis by telephone. He called C.J. Peters at Fort Detrick and told him that he had a monkey caretaker who was sick. In his dry, calm voice, now without any hint that he had recently been weeping, he said to Peters, “You have permission to consider the facility and all the animals to be the responsibility of USAMRIID.”
Colonel C.J. Peters was a little distrustful of the phrase “the responsibility of USAMRIID.” It implied that if anything went wrong and people died, the Army could be held responsible and could be sued. He wanted to take control of the building and nuke it, but he didn’t want lawsuits. So he said to Dalgard that the safety of his people and the safety of the general public were the most important things to him but that he would have to clear this with his command. He said he would get back to Dalgard as soon as possible.
Then they talked about the sick man, and C.J. learned that he was being taken to Fairfax Hospital. That disturbed him greatly. He felt that it should be assumed that the guy was breaking with Ebola—and do you really want to bring a guy like that into a community hospital? Look at what Ebola had done in hospitals in Africa. C.J. thought the man belonged in the Slammer at the Institute.
As soon as he got off the line with Dalgard, C.J. Peters telephoned Joe McCormick, who was in charge of the C.D.C. effort. He said to Mccormick something like, “I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment,” and he offered to pick up the sick man in an Army ambulance—put him in an Army biocontainment pod—and carry the pod to the Army’s facilities at the Institute. Put him in the Slammer.
C.J. Peters recalls that McCormick said to him something like, “I want the guy at Fairfax Hospital.” C.J. replied, “All right, I believe this, Joe, and you believe that, and we don’t agree. Regardless—what is going to happen to the medical personnel at Fairfax Hospital or to you. Joe, if Ebola virus gets into that hospital?”
McCormick would not budge on his decision: he had been face-to-face with Ebola in Africa, and he hadn’t gotten sick. He had worked for days inside a mud hut that was smeared with Ebola blood, on his knees among people who were crashing on and bleeding out. You didn’t need a space suit to handle an Ebola patient. They could be handled by skilled nurses in a good hospital. The guy was going to Fairfax Hospital. C.J. Peters, in spite of his strong dislike for McCormick, found himself admiring him for making strong decisions in a very difficult situation.
A television-news van arrived at the monkey house from Channel 4 in Washington. The workers peered through curtains at the van, and when the reporter came to the door and pushed the buzzer, no one answered. Dalgard had made it clear to them that no one was to talk to the media. Just then, an ambulance from Fairfax Hospital arrived to take Frantig away. Channel 4’s timing could not have been better. The news team turned on their lights and started filming the action. The door of the monkey house swung open and Milton Frantig stumbled out, still wearing his Tyvek suit, looking embarrassed. He walked over to the ambulance, the medical team opened the back doors of the vehicle, and Frantig climbed in by himself and lay down on the gurney. They slammed the doors and took off with Channel 4 following them. A few minutes later, the ambulance and Channel 4 pulled into Fairfax Hospital. Frantig was put in an isolation room, with access restricted to doctors and nurses wearing rubber gloves, gowns, and surgical masks. He said he felt better. He prayed to the Lord and watched a little television.
Back at the monkey house, the situation had become unbearable for the remaining workers. They had seen people in space suits, they had seen their colleague puking the grass, they had seen Channel 4 chasing the
