tiny breaks), God help you. In the terms used by the scientists: It’s not very contagious but it’s highly infectious. Six days after the needle prick, Geoffrey Platt got sick.
At the start he merely felt nauseous and exhausted, with abdominal pain. Given the circumstances, though, his malaise was taken very seriously. He was admitted to a special unit for infectious diseases at a hospital near London and, within that unit, put into a plastic-walled isolator tent under negative air pressure. The historical records don’t mention it but you can be sure his nurses and doctors wore masks. He was given injections of interferon, to help stimulate his immune system, and blood serum (flown up from Africa) that had been drawn from a recovered Ebola patient to supply some borrowed antibodies. On the fourth day, Platt’s temperature spiked and he vomited. This suggested the virus was thriving. For the next three days, his crisis period, he suffered more vomiting, plus diarrhea, and a spreading rash; his urine output was low; and a fungal growth in his throat hinted at immune failure. All these were gloomy signs. Meanwhile he was given more serum. Maybe it helped.
By the eighth day, Platt’s vomiting and diarrhea had ended. Two days later, the rash began to fade and the fungus was under control. He had been lucky, perhaps genetically, as well as privileged to receive optimal medical care. The virus disappeared from his blood, from his urine, and from his feces (though it lingered awhile in his semen; apparently he promised doctors that he wouldn’t make that a risk issue for anyone else). He was taken out of the isolator. Eventually he went home. He had lost weight, and during the long, slow convalescence much of his hair fell out. But like the Swiss woman, he survived.
The Russian researcher, in 1996, wasn’t so lucky. Her name, as given in one Russian news account (but unspoken in the western medical literature), was Nadezhda Alekseevna Makovetskaya. Employed at a virological institute under the Ministry of Defense, she had been working on an experimental therapy against Ebola virus disease, derived from the blood serum of horses. Horses aren’t susceptible to Ebola—not like they are to Hendra—which is why they are used to make antibodies. Testing the efficacy of this treatment required exposing additional horses. “It is difficult to describe working with a horse infected with Ebola,” according to the dry, cautious statement from Russia’s chief biowarfare man at the time, a lieutenant general named Valentin Yevstigneyev, in the Ministry of Defense. No doubt he was right about that. A horse can be nervous and jumpy, even if it’s not suffering convulsions. Who would want to get close with a needle? “Under normal conditions this animal is difficult to manage and we had to work in special protective gear,” said General Yevstigneyev. What he meant by “we” might be broadly interpreted. He was a high officer and military bureaucrat, not likely pulling the latex mitts onto his own hands. “One false step, one torn glove and the consequences would be grave.” Makovetskaya had evidently taken that false step. Or maybe it wasn’t her mistake so much as the twitch of a sensitive gelding. “She tore her protective gloves but concealed it from the leadership,” by General Yevstigneyev’s unsympathetic account, “since it happened just before the New Year holidays.” Was he implying that she hadn’t wanted to miss seasonal festivities while sitting in quarantine? He didn’t mention a needlestick, or a scratch, or an open cut beneath the torn glove, though some such misfortune must have been involved. “As a result, by the time she turned to a doctor for help it was too late.” The details of Makovetskaya’s symptoms and death remain secret.
Another Russian woman stuck herself with Ebola in May 2004, and about this case slightly more is known. Antonina Presnyakova was a forty-six-year-old technician working at a high-security viral research center called Vektor (which sounds like something from Ian Fleming) in southwestern Siberia. Presnyakova’s syringe carried blood from a guinea pig infected with Ebola virus. The needle went through two layers of gloves into her left palm. She immediately entered an isolation clinic, developed symptoms within a few days, and died at the end of two weeks.
These three cases reflect the inherent perils of doing laboratory research on such a lethal, infectious virus. They also suggest the context of concerns that surrounded America’s closest approach to a home-grown case of Ebola. This one occurred also in 2004, just