I learned from Besselink and others, conspired to bring C. burnetii out of those sheds in great quantity and launch it on the wind.
Coxiella burnetii is an assertive bug. It not only causes abortion in goats but also concentrates massively in the placental material expelled during those abortive deliveries. A single gram of placenta from an aborting goat can contain as many as 1 billion bacterial particles. It is also excreted in milk, urine, feces, and during normal deliveries of kids carried to term. Assuming those deliveries and abortions occur within the kidding shed, how does the stuff escape? Very simply, Besselink explained: Goat feces and dirty bedding straw are shoveled up and carried outside by the farmers to fertilize their fields. From there the bacteria can waft into a nearby village as easily as the pleasant, autumnal smell of smoke from a pile of leaves.
Two goat farms in the Herpen vicinity attracted attention. One was a sizable commercial operation with almost four thousand goats, which had suffered a storm of abortions in April. The other was a “hobby farm” with less than ten animals. When the study team came down from RIVM to look for the source of the outbreak, they visited both places, taking samples of urine, milk, manure, and straw from the stable floors; insects from a light trap; and water from drinking buckets. The hobby farm seemed to be clean. From the commercial farm, every category of sample included evidence of Coxiella burnetii except the milk, the urine, and the water. “There were a lot of Coxiella bacteria in the farm,” Besselink recalled. It was only a kilometer south of the village—virtually right next door. That farmer and his family endured some obloquy during the following year. “He has a wife, he has kids, the kids go to school here, so they were having a hard time because they were having the blame, of course, of what was going on,” Besselink said. The goat farmer hadn’t done anything illegal, merely been unlucky and maybe a little careless, but he suffered lost revenue, sapped energy, sleepless nights. A village doctor comes to know these things. The farmer’s children were stigmatized and his kids—that is, his nanny goats’ kids—were suspect also, having been born under circumstances that included a plume of virulent microbes.
Arnout de Bruin, a molecular biologist with a background in evolutionary studies, was part of the RIVM team that went to Herpen. When I met him at the institute’s headquarters, a fenced complex in a suburb of Utrecht, he wore a light stubble of beard and a brown T-shirt reading VARSITY TEAM—NORTH DAKOTA. He was a bright young man with a dark sense of whimsy. The funny thing about his involvement with the outbreak down there, de Bruin told me cheerily, was that it only happened because he’d been studying Q fever as a possible bioterrorist threat. (The bacterium had a history of attracting dark interest; biological warfare researchers in the United States had worked on it during the 1950s, so had the Soviets, and four decades later the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo seems to have considered it, before using sarin gas for their 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway.) De Bruin’s group on that project, a “biological calamities” team, had developed PCR primers for detecting Coxiella burnetii in a sample. So when the cases started piling up in Noord-Brabant, both among goats and among people, and the health authorities wanted urgently to trace the source, they asked de Bruin’s team for help. Okay, yeah, sure. He and his partners jumped at the chance for a field test of their new molecular tools. On the advice of veterinary officials, who knew of the abortion wave on the big commercial farm, they went to that place.
“And the farmer said, ‘This is the secure area, and this is the nonsecure area, because here the goats have been standing which had aborted,’ ” de Bruin told me. “So we took all kinds of samples. Surface area swabs, water from the drinking buckets, vaginal swabs from the goats. What did we take more? Oh yeah, for instance, insects, from the insect lamp. Dust particles, hay, manure.” He laughed grimly. “We found it everywhere.”
What sort of protection were you wearing? I asked. Masks, respirators? None, he said, laughing again, at his own foolishness and the laxity of supervisory vigilance. “But nobody got sick.” Maybe he and his colleagues were lucky. Anyway, the farmer was wrong about which parts of his property