itself in them as a useful host. Therefore, Marburg lived in some other kind 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 ofinvestigators under the auspices of the World Health Organization flew to Uganda to try to find out where those monkeys had come from. It turned out they had been trapped at locations all over central 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 the 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 the 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 were injured or had skin lesions.” 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 being 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 abit short of monkeys, he went out to the island and caught a few, unknown to me, and those infected or recently infected monkeys were then shipped off to Europe.” Mr. Jones thinks it is possible that the Marburg agent had established itself on the hot island, and was circulating among the monkeys there, and that some of the monkeys which ended up in Germany had actually come from that 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 shipping off suspect monkeys collected on a
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 the 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 the 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 were injured or had skin lesions.” 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 being 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 abit short of monkeys, he went out to the island and caught a few, unknown to me, and those infected or recently infected monkeys were then shipped off to Europe.” Mr. Jones thinks it is possible that the Marburg agent had established itself on the hot island, and was circulating among the monkeys there, and that some of the monkeys which ended up in Germany had actually come from that 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 shipping off suspect monkeys collected on a
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