some sort of virus. The stable hand, a big-hearted man named Ray Unwin, who merely went home to endure his fever in private, survived. Peter Reid, though he had been working on the same suffering horses amid the same bloody froth, stayed healthy. He and Unwin told me their stories when I found them, years later, by asking around Hendra and making a few calls.
At The Feed Bin, for instance, someone said: Ray Unwin, yeah, most likely he’ll be at Bob Bradshaw’s. I followed directions to Bradshaw’s stable and there on the driveway was a man who turned out to be Unwin, carrying grain in a bucket. At that point he was a middle-aged working bloke with a sandy red ponytail and a weary sadness in his eyes. He was a little shy about attention from a stranger; he’d had enough of that already from doctors, public health officials, and local reporters. Once we sat down to chat, he professed that he wasn’t a “whinger” (complainer) but that his health had been “crook” (not right) since it happened.
As the horse deaths came to crescendo, the government of Queensland had intervened, in the form of veterinarians and other personnel from the Department of Primary Industries (responsible for livestock, wildlife, and agriculture throughout the state) and field officers from Queensland Health. The DPI veterinarians began doing necropsies—that is, cutting up horses, looking for clues—right in Vic Rail’s little yard. Before long there were horse heads lying around, severed limbs, blood and other fluids flowing down the gutter, suspect organs and tissues going into bags. Another neighbor of Rail’s, a fellow horse man named Peter Hulbert, recollected the gruesome pageant that had transpired next door, while serving me instant coffee in his kitchen. As the kettle came to a boil, Hulbert recalled the garbage containers used by DPI. “These street wheelie bins here, there was horses’ legs and heads . . . —do you have sugar?”
No thanks, I said, black.
“. . . horses’ legs and heads and guts and everything, going into these wheelie bins. It—was—horrendous.” By midafternoon that day, he added, word had spread and the TV stations showed up with their news cameras. “Agh. It was bloody terrible, mate.” Then the police arrived too and threw a tape cordon around Rail’s place, treating it as a crime scene. Had one of his enemies done this? The racing world had its underbelly, like any business, and probably more so than most. Peter Hulbert even faced pointed questioning about whether Vic might have poisoned his own horses and then himself.
While the police wondered about sabotage or insurance scam, the health officials had other hypotheses to concern them. One was hantavirus—which is actually a group of viruses, long known to virologists following outbreaks in Russia, Scandinavia, and elsewhere but newly conspicuous since a year earlier, 1993, when a new hantavirus emerged dramatically and killed ten people around the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. Australia is justifiably wary of exotic diseases invading its borders, and hantavirus in the country would be even worse news (except for horses) than African horse sickness. So the DPI vets packed up samples of blood and tissue from the dead horses and sent them on ice to the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, a high-security institution known by its acronym, AAHL, pronounced “aahl,” in a town called Geelong, south of Melbourne. A team of microbiologists and veterinarians there put the sample material through a series of tests, attempting to culture and identify a microbe, and to confirm that the microbe made horses sick.
They found a virus. It wasn’t a hantavirus. It wasn’t AHS virus. It was something new, something the AAHL microscopist hadn’t seen before but which, from its size and its shape, resembled members of a particular virus group, the paramyxoviruses. This new virus differed from known paramyxoviruses in that each particle carried a double fringe of spikes. Other AAHL researchers sequenced a stretch of the viral genome and, submitting that sequence into a vast viral database, found a weak match to one subgroup of these viruses. That seemed to confirm the visual judgment of the microscopist. The matching subgroup was the morbilliviruses, which include rinderpest virus and canine distemper virus (infecting nonhuman animals) and measles (in humans). So the creature from Hendra was classified and given a name, based on those provisional identifications: equine morbillivirus (EMV). Roughly, horse measles.
About the same time, the AAHL researchers tested a sample of tissue that had been taken from Vic Rail’s