back into the clothes he’d just taken off. He ran out of the house, slamming the door behind him, got into his
two-year-old Grand Cherokee Jeep, started the V8 engine, pulled the shift lever into ‘drive’ and raced off down the street.
Traffic was heavy at the intersection, so Hardin reached down and flicked a couple of switches on the dashboard. Two red lights fitted behind the radiator grille began alternately flashing, and
a two-tone siren started its discordant wailing. Traffic parted, Hardin hauled the steering wheel around to the right and floored the gas pedal.
Eighteen minutes later he walked into the CDC and three minutes after that he opened the door to Walter Cross’s office. Cross was Hardin’s immediate superior and head of the Special
Pathogens Branch, but the two men had worked together for so long that they were firm friends.
They had to some extent been thrown together by their qualifications. Although the Centers for Disease Control is a major organization, employing around seven thousand people and with an annual
budget in excess of two billion dollars, there are exactly eight employees who are qualified to work in the Bio-Safety Level 4 laboratory. One was Walter Cross, the Head of Special Pathogens
– a highly specialized department within the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases – and another was Tyler Hardin.
The CDC BSL4 laboratory is one of two maximum-safety biological research laboratories in America, and one of only six in the entire world. Entry is by ID card and a personal identification code
punched into a keypad by a scientist wearing a totally sealed biological spacesuit, who even then has to enter through a negative-pressure airlock, to ensure that air can only bleed into the
laboratory and never out of it, and a powerful decontamination shower.
Only inside one of these secure laboratories is it safe to examine any of the handful of microscopic and utterly lethal species-killer viruses.
Viruses are usually named after the places where they were discovered, and the first of what became known as the species-killers emerged in 1967 in Marburg in Northern Germany. The Marburg virus
arrived at the Behring Works factory inside an infected African green monkey, the kidney cells of these animals being used by Behring to produce vaccines. Somehow, the Marburg virus jumped from the
monkey into the immediate human population working at the factory. By the time the outbreak was over, thirty-one people had been infected and seven were dead. Marburg proved it had about a
twenty-five per cent lethality.
Marburg is a type of organism known as a filovirus, one of a small and highly lethal family of haemorrhagic fever viruses, which closely resemble one another but which bear little resemblance to
other known viruses. Under the impartial gaze of an electron microscope, the reason for the appellation filovirus (from the Latin filo , meaning ‘thread’ or
‘threadlike’) becomes immediately obvious, the shape of the virus being just that.
Marburg was the first, but unfortunately it wasn’t the last.
The Ebola River is a tributary of the Congo or Zaïre River and, just under ten years after Marburg began its rampage in Germany, a new and even more deadly filovirus emerged from the
rainforest. Named Ebola Zaïre after the river and the country, it appeared almost simultaneously in over fifty native villages scattered near the headwaters of the Ebola River, and killed nine
out of every ten people who became infected.
Ebola Zaïre was and is the most lethal fast-acting virus the world has ever seen, killing its victims in a matter of days, spreading easily and swiftly through any close-knit population
through body-fluid exchange. A drop of infected blood on a cut finger is quite enough to start the infection.
It is popularly believed that Ebola attacks every organ in the body apart from skeletal muscle and bone, multiplying at a terrifying rate and converting body
two-year-old Grand Cherokee Jeep, started the V8 engine, pulled the shift lever into ‘drive’ and raced off down the street.
Traffic was heavy at the intersection, so Hardin reached down and flicked a couple of switches on the dashboard. Two red lights fitted behind the radiator grille began alternately flashing, and
a two-tone siren started its discordant wailing. Traffic parted, Hardin hauled the steering wheel around to the right and floored the gas pedal.
Eighteen minutes later he walked into the CDC and three minutes after that he opened the door to Walter Cross’s office. Cross was Hardin’s immediate superior and head of the Special
Pathogens Branch, but the two men had worked together for so long that they were firm friends.
They had to some extent been thrown together by their qualifications. Although the Centers for Disease Control is a major organization, employing around seven thousand people and with an annual
budget in excess of two billion dollars, there are exactly eight employees who are qualified to work in the Bio-Safety Level 4 laboratory. One was Walter Cross, the Head of Special Pathogens
– a highly specialized department within the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases – and another was Tyler Hardin.
The CDC BSL4 laboratory is one of two maximum-safety biological research laboratories in America, and one of only six in the entire world. Entry is by ID card and a personal identification code
punched into a keypad by a scientist wearing a totally sealed biological spacesuit, who even then has to enter through a negative-pressure airlock, to ensure that air can only bleed into the
laboratory and never out of it, and a powerful decontamination shower.
Only inside one of these secure laboratories is it safe to examine any of the handful of microscopic and utterly lethal species-killer viruses.
Viruses are usually named after the places where they were discovered, and the first of what became known as the species-killers emerged in 1967 in Marburg in Northern Germany. The Marburg virus
arrived at the Behring Works factory inside an infected African green monkey, the kidney cells of these animals being used by Behring to produce vaccines. Somehow, the Marburg virus jumped from the
monkey into the immediate human population working at the factory. By the time the outbreak was over, thirty-one people had been infected and seven were dead. Marburg proved it had about a
twenty-five per cent lethality.
Marburg is a type of organism known as a filovirus, one of a small and highly lethal family of haemorrhagic fever viruses, which closely resemble one another but which bear little resemblance to
other known viruses. Under the impartial gaze of an electron microscope, the reason for the appellation filovirus (from the Latin filo , meaning ‘thread’ or
‘threadlike’) becomes immediately obvious, the shape of the virus being just that.
Marburg was the first, but unfortunately it wasn’t the last.
The Ebola River is a tributary of the Congo or Zaïre River and, just under ten years after Marburg began its rampage in Germany, a new and even more deadly filovirus emerged from the
rainforest. Named Ebola Zaïre after the river and the country, it appeared almost simultaneously in over fifty native villages scattered near the headwaters of the Ebola River, and killed nine
out of every ten people who became infected.
Ebola Zaïre was and is the most lethal fast-acting virus the world has ever seen, killing its victims in a matter of days, spreading easily and swiftly through any close-knit population
through body-fluid exchange. A drop of infected blood on a cut finger is quite enough to start the infection.
It is popularly believed that Ebola attacks every organ in the body apart from skeletal muscle and bone, multiplying at a terrifying rate and converting body
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