was admitted to Bellevue Hospital. His symptoms developed slowly—tender lymph nodes, abdominal cramps, paralysis of his legs, inability to urinate, tingling numbness in his arms, and then a high fever and hiccupping—until, after two weeks, he was very sick indeed. His breathing became labored and he turned blue. Put into a respirator, he convulsed and lost consciousness. Frothy liquid came wheezing out of his mouth and nostrils. Five hours later, William Brebner was dead at the age of twenty-nine.
What killed him? Was it polio? Was it rabies? A fellow researcher in the same NYU lab, just out of medical school but bright and ambitious, assisted at Brebner’s autopsy and then made a further investigation, using bits of Brebner’s brain, spinal cord, lymph nodes, and spleen. This man was Albert B. Sabin, decades before his fame as creator of an oral polio vaccine. Sabin and a colleague injected an emulsion from Brebner’s brain back into monkeys; they also injected some mice, guinea pigs, and dogs. None of those animals showed signs of what Brebner had suffered. But rabbits, likewise injected, did. Their legs went limp, they died of respiratory failure, their spleens and livers were damaged. From the rabbits, Sabin and his partner extracted a filtered essence capable of causing the same course of infection again. They called it simply “the B virus,” after Brebner. Other work showed that it was a herpesvirus.
Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When it doesn’t kill, it often leaves survivors with neurological damage. It’s an occupational hazard of scientists and technicians who work with laboratory macaques. Among the macaques themselves it’s common, but merely an annoyance. It abides within nerve ganglia and emerges intermittently to cause mild lesions, usually in or around the monkey’s mouth, like cold sores or canker sores from herpes simplex in humans. The monkey sores come and go. Not so with herpes B in people. In the decades since Brebner’s death, forty-two other human cases have been diagnosed, all involving scientists or laboratory technicians or other animal-handlers who had contact with macaques in captivity.
The number of human cases rose quickly during the era of fervid research toward a polio vaccine, in the 1950s, probably because those efforts entailed such a sharp increase in the use of rhesus macaques. Conditions of caging and handling were primitive, compared with standards for medical research on primates today. Between 1949 and 1951, a single project within the overall effort financed by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (aka the March of Dimes) consumed seventeen thousand monkeys. The foundation maintained a sort of clearinghouse for imported monkeys in South Carolina, from which one leading researcher had a standing order of fifty macaques per month, at $26 apiece, delivered. Nobody knows exactly how many macaques were “sacrificed” in the labs of Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk, let alone other researchers, but the incidence of herpes B infections peaked in 1957–1958, just as the polio vaccine quest came to its crescendo. Most of those cases occurred in the United States, the rest in Canada and Britain, places where rhesus macaques were thousands of miles removed from their natural habitat but medical research was intensive.
From that 1950s peak, the rate of accidental infections declined, possibly because lab techs began taking better precautions, such as wearing gloves and masks, and tranquilizing monkeys before handling them. In the 1980s came a small second uptick in herpes B incidents, correlated with another increase in the use of macaques, this time for research on AIDS.
The most recent case occurred at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, in late 1997. On October 29, a young woman working among the captive monkeys was splashed in the eye with some sort of bodily gook from a rhesus macaque. It may have been urine, or feces, or spit; nobody seems to know. She wiped her eye with a paper towel, soldiering on through her chores, and almost an hour later found time to rinse the eye briefly with water. That wasn’t enough. She filed no incident report, but ten days later the eye was red and swollen. She went to an ER, where the physician on duty prescribed antibiotic eyedrops. Thanks a lot. When the eye inflammation worsened, she saw an ophthalmologist. More days passed, and