Allow me to throw a little gasoline on the doom.
The monkeys running wild and free in Pennsylvania are from Mauritius. The lab monkeys involved in the Reston, VA Ebola outbreak (1989) were imported from the Phillippines. Only monkeys died in the outbreak, but antibody tests confirmed airborne and monkey-to-human transmission.
We don't have a whole lot of control over standards at overseas animal facilities. Let's hope "cold-like symptoms" are all we have to deal with in this latest incident.
Read:
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (1994). From Amazon:
A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.
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Excellent book!
I read it when I worked for Henrico Doctors' Hospital just outside of Richmond VA.
When I wasn't running around the hospital with my hair on fire, I would sit in central processing (in the Lab) to just chill. There is something comforting about listening to the centrifuge, mass spec., and idle chatter at 2am. Its is relaxing. The calm before the storm so to speak.
Anyways, I was reading The Hot Zone in central and one of our Pathologist came out of the blood bank and stopped and looked at the book cover. This man turned white! I asked him if he was OK, got up and wheeled the chair over to him and he basically fell into it. Turns out he was with a support team for that operation up in Reston VA. He kept on saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, that he couldn't believe they declassified it. I mean this poor guy was shook and in shock. We took him down the hall to the ED and got him a Valium and some fluids. His wife came and collected him and he took a few days off.
For those not familiar:
RESTV was discovered in
crab-eating macaques from
Hazleton Laboratories (now Labcorp Drug Development) in 1989. This attracted significant media attention due to the proximity of Reston to the
Washington, DC, metro area and the lethality of a closely related Ebola virus. Despite its status as a
level-4 organism, Reston virus is non-
pathogenic to humans, though hazardous to monkeys;
[6][7] the perception of its lethality was compounded by the monkey's
coinfection with
Simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV).
[8] Despite ongoing research, the determinants for lack of human pathogenicity are yet to be discovered.
[9]
en.m.wikipedia.org
I know it's Wiki and not everyones favorite site but I'm being lazy, lol. If you want more info there is plenty. Off you go!
