Setting: Mount Elgon, Africa-Where they think the Ebola viruses originated from and spread to the monkeys. Reston Monkey House, Virginia-Where a shipment of monkeys from Africa was sent, soon after the monkeys arrived every monkey came down with the virus. Characters: “Charles Monet”-A French man living in western Kenya. In January 1980, he starts dying of the Marburg after visiting the Kitum Cave in Mount Elgon. Eugene Johnson- Civilian virus hunter working for the Army, who specializes in the Ebola virus.
In the spring of 1988, following the death of “Peter Cardinal”, he leads an Army expedition to the Kitum Cave in Mount Elgon. “Peter Cardinal”- Danish boy visiting Kenya with his parents, within 2 days of visiting the Kitum Cave he starts coming down with the Marburg virus and dies 12 days later. Dan Dalgard- Veterinarian at the Reston Monkey house. Peter Jahrling- Civilian Army virologist. Codiscoverer of the strain of virus that burns through the Reston Monkey house. Dr. Joseph B. McCormick- Chief of the Special Pathogens Branch of the C. D. C.
Treated human Ebola patients in a hut in Sudan, where he accidentally stuck himself with a needle that he had been using on an Ebola patient. He died 13 days later. Before I start what is the… Ebola Virus: Extremely lethal virus from the tropics, its exact origin unknown. It has three subtypes: Marburg-Known as the gentle sister, it affects humans somewhat like radiation, damaging virtually all of the tissues in their bodies. Marburg is an African organism, but it has a German name. Viruses are named for the place where they are first discovered.
Marburg is an old city in Central Germany, surrounded by forests and meadows, where factories nestle in green valleys. The virus erupted there in 1967, in a factory called the Behring Works, which produced vaccines using kidney cells from African green monkeys. The Behring works imported monkeys from Uganda. The virus came to Germany hidden somewhere in a series of air shipments of monkeys totaling 500 or 600. As few as 2 or 3 monkeys were incubating the virus. They were probably not even visibly sick.
At any rate, shortly after they arrived at the Behring works, the virus began to spread among them, and a few of them crashed and bleed out. Soon afterward, the Marburg agent jumped species and suddenly emerged in the human population of the city. Ebola Sudan- It has the same affects as the Marburg virus but has a higher death rate. The last one and most lethal is Ebola Zaire- The first known emergence of Ebola Zaire occurred in 1976, when it erupted simultaneously in fifty-five villages near the headwaters of the Ebola river.
It kills nine out of ten that come down with it, the symptoms are this: A headache usually begins on the seventh day after exposure to it, you then feel a throbbing pain behind your eyeballs and your headache grows worse. On the 8th day after exposure all those symptoms from before grow worse and you get a severe backache, then on the 3rd day after the headache begins you feel nauseated, spike a fever, and start to vomit, your eyeballs turn bright red and your face turns yellowish, with starlike red speckles.
Usually on the 10th day after exposure you start to have black vomit (which is highly infective and lethally hot). By the 11th day most patients of Ebola Zaire would crash and bleed out (die of shock, with profuse hemorrhages from the orifices of the body). This story is mostly told from the point of view from the author and what he discovered from his research on this epidemic. Plot- This story starts in the 1980s in late December, in Mount Elgon where “Charles Monet” was exploring with a friend, 7 days later he came down with the symptoms of one of the Ebola viruses.
Of course he didn’t know this since it had only just been discovered 6 years before so they didn’t know very much about it. He soon dies of it, but the doctor who examined him suddenly comes down with the same symptoms. Right before he dies, he asks one of the nurses to take a sample of his blood, which she sends to a few laboratories (the National Institute of Virology in Sandringham, South Africa and to the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, Georgia) for testing. The laboratory in South Africa soon calls Washington D. C, USA saying they have found a form of Ebola, which was soon to be called Marburg.
In Africa they started to worry about getting it, so a mission in Yambuku started to give free hypodermic shots to people all day long. The problem with this is that they used the same 5 needles the whole day, and soon people who lived near there or had received a shot, died within 13 days, it was known as “the epidemic”. Two years later in Virginia, Dan Dalgard a veterinarian in the Reston Monkey house, starts to notice signs in the monkeys that appeared to be the flu, until the monkeys began to die, soon it moved to the other rooms and they showed the same signs, and they too died.
He took some of the dead monkeys and took out their livers and took some blood samples, he then sent them to Washington D. C where they identified it as Ebola Zaire. They then sent out a crew of trained army biochemists to kill the remaining monkeys and to rid the house of the disastrous disease before it could spread any further and start killing humans, obviously since we are all still alive they succeeded, thank goodness.