Word: ebola
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...question ceased to be, When will infectious diseases be wiped out? and became, Where will the next deadly new plague appear? Scientists are keeping a nervous watch on such lethal agents as the Marburg and Ebola viruses in Africa and the Junin, Machupo and Sabia viruses in South America. And there are uncountable threats that haven't even been named: a virus known only as "X" emerged from the rain forest in southern Sudan last year, killed thousands and disappeared. No one knows when it might arise again...
...Army lab in Frederick, Maryland, faced a terrifying situation in 1989 when imported monkeys started dying from a strain of the Ebola virus. After destroying 500 monkeys and quarantining the lab and everyone in it, officials found that this particular strain was harmless to humans. But the episode was dramatic enough to inspire an article in the New Yorker magazine -- now expanded into a soon-to-be released book called The Hot Zone -- and work on two competing movies (one of which seems to have collapsed before production...
...Ebola affair and the emergence of AIDS illustrate how modern travel and global commerce can quickly spread disease. Germs once confined to certain regions may now pick up rides to all parts of the world. For example, the cholera plague that is currently sweeping Latin America arrived in the ballast tanks of a ship that brought tainted water from Asia. And the New England Journal of Medicine has reported two cases of malaria in New Jersey that were transmitted by local mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were probably infected when they bit human malaria victims who had immigrated from Latin America...
Such dangerous viruses may seem a distant mencace, but as a Yale researcher learned last week, accidents can happen. The Hot Zone details a 1989 Ebola crisis that occurred not in the forests of Afreica but in Reston, Virginia, only 15 miles from Washington. It all started at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit, run by a company that imports and sells monkeys for use in research laboratories. When an unusual number of deaths were recorded among a shipment of monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines, tissue samples were sent to a U.S. Army research center...
There a technician identified the strands as either Ebola Zaire or something very close to it. Even more alarming, an incident at the Reston building seemed to confirm that this virus, unlike the African one, could be transmitted through the air. Franctic phone calls were made to Virginia health authorities and to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The Reston building was, in Army parlance, a "hot zone," an area that contained lethal, infectious organisms. An Army team, wearing space suits, killed the 450 surviving monkeys by lethal injection, and the cadavers were place in plastic bags for disposal...