another ophthalmologist examined her, before she was hospitalized for suspected herpes B. Now they put her on strong antiviral drugs. Meanwhile, cultures taken from swabbing her eyes were quietly retrieved from the commercial laboratories to which they had been sent for analysis—um, never mind, we’ll just take those back. Her cultures had belatedly been deemed too dangerous for ordinary lab workers to handle.
The young woman seemed to improve slightly and left the hospital. But she woke the next morning with worsening symptoms—abdominal pain, inability to urinate, weakness in her right foot—and went back. At the end of the month, she began having seizures. Then came pneumonia. She died of respiratory failure on December 10, 1997. Despite the fact that her own father was an infectious-disease doctor, her mother was a nurse, and Yerkes was full of people who knew about herpes B, modern medicine hadn’t been able to save her.
This pathetic mishap put some people on edge. The probability of cross-species transmission might be low—very low, under normal circumstances—but the consequences were high. Several years later, when eleven rhesus macaques at a “safari park” in England tested positive for herpes B antibodies, management decided to exterminate the entire colony. This decision was driven by the fact that Britain’s Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National regulations specified that any animals infected with a level-4 agent had to be either handled under BSL-4 containment (meaning space suits, triple gloves, airlock doors, and all the rest, not quite practicable at a tourist attraction for viewing wildlife) or destroyed. Of course, positive results on antibody tests meant only that those eleven monkeys had been exposed to the virus, not that they were presently infected, let alone shedding herpes B. But that scientific distinction didn’t stop the cull. Hired shooters killed all 215 animals at the safari park, using silenced .22 rifles, in a single day. Two weeks later, another animal park in the English countryside followed suit, killing their hundred macaques after some tested positive for herpes B antibodies. The law was the law, and macaques (infected or not) were probably now bad for business. A more sensitive question, raised by primatologists who considered such cullings grotesque and unnecessary, was whether herpes B does or doesn’t belong in level 4. Some arguments suggest that it doesn’t.
The rhesus macaque isn’t the only monkey that carries herpes B. The same virus has been found in other Asian monkeys, including the long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) within its native range in Indonesia. In the wild, though, neither rhesus macaques nor the others have passed any known herpes B infections to humans, not even in situations where the monkeys come into close contact with people. For this there’s no easy explanation, because the opportunities do seem to exist. Both rhesus macaques and long-tailed macaques are opportunistic creatures, largely unafraid of humans or human environments. As the chainsaws and machetes of humanity’s advance guard have driven them out of their native forest habitats—in India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines—they have been only more willing to take their chances scavenging, stealing, and panhandling at the edges of civilization. They live anywhere they can find food and a modicum of tolerance. You can see rhesus macaques lurking along the parapets of government buildings in Delhi. You can glimpse long-tailed macaques scrounging garbage from the corridors of dormitories at a university not far from Kuala Lumpur. And because both the Hindu and Buddhist religions embrace gentle attitudes toward animals in general, toward nonhuman primates in particular, macaques have become abundantly, boldly present at many temples around their native regions, especially where any such temple stands near or within a remnant of forest.
At Hindu sites, they have the advantage of their resemblance to the monkey god Hanuman. Buddhism, at least as practiced in Japan, China, and India, also carries ancient threads of monkey veneration. You can see it in iconic art and sculpture, such as the famed three-monkeys carving (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) on the Toshogu Shrine, north of Tokyo. Over generations, over centuries, macaques within these landscapes have come in from the wild and habituated themselves to human proximity. Now they’re mascot monkeys at many temples and shrines, indulged like acolytes of Hanuman or the Shinto deity Sanno, living largely on handouts from pilgrims and tourists.
One such place is the Sangeh