The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett Read Free Book Online

same. When identity was impossible to ascertain, Kuns shipped samples to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., or the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where experts made the final judgment calls.
    In coming months Kuns would complete one of the most exhaustive ecology surveys ever conducted in South America, all done in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of an epidemic. Having flown bombing missions over Germany in World War II, Kuns had no trouble staying cool, though he never forgot that any insect or animal he held in his hands might carry the deadly virus.
    The team went to enormous lengths to find the culprit. A typical rectangular thatched/wattle house was purchased and meticulously deconstructed pole by pole, every insect and animal scraped off and analyzed. By night Kuns and MacKenzie, wearing miner’s headlamps, waded into knee-deep water to collect nocturnal animals such as vampire bats and night mosquitoes. Even though they tried to maintain a modicum of nonchalance on such occasions, MacKenzie couldn’t help but feel chills when he would turn suddenly and spot beady red eyes staring at him. After a few nights on such forays, Kuns and MacKenzie figured out that the eyes belonged to giant constrictor snakes, anacondas, one of which they measured at over eighteen feet in length.
    The townspeople were anxious to help, and Kuns had to warn people not to handle the animals unless they had already survived the disease. One afternoon the leader of Kuns’s volunteer ecology army, Einar Dorado, held a big gray mouse in his hands while Merl tried to jab the beast with a needle in order to withdraw a blood sample. The angry animal squirmed, bit Dorado, and urinated over his hands.
    Two weeks later Dorado was dead. His prior ailment had probably been the flu and he was not immune to the mysterious virus.
    Kuns thought about that large gray mouse—a type of rodent that was pervasive throughout San Joaquin. He remembered visiting a small home in the middle of town and spotting a six-year-old girl asleep atop a cowhide
laid across the dirt floor. When the girl awoke, Kuns lifted the hide and dozens of those same big gray mice raced out of a nest in the floor.
    As soon as Johnson and MacKenzie arrived in San Joaquin, the team spread word that they would give money to anybody who captured sick wild animals. Despite the strong monetary incentive, villagers were able to bring in only five sick animals over the next ten months, all large gray mice. The rodents were of a wild Calomys species normally found in the bush. Three of the animals died, suffering symptoms similar to those seen among the people of San Joaquin. The other two recovered and became virus carriers. The mysterious virus, which the team had dubbed Machupo after the local river, was found in the blood, spleens, or brains of the five animals.
    The team hypothesized that the disease was carried the same way as the plague: by insects that inhabited the fur of the rodents. An alternative idea held that mosquitoes or ticks that fed on the mice might, in turn, feed on human blood and thereby spread the virus. In either case, an insect carrier had to be found.
    From September 1963 to November 1964, the team, now including Webb, made numerous frustrating trips back and forth between San Joaquin and their Panama laboratories. They captured thousands of insects, ranging from tiny fleas and mites to larger ticks and mosquitoes. The insects were mashed up and their extracts scoured for Machupo virus.
    None was found.
    Night after late night in the Panama laboratory Johnson complained to Webb, “I can’t tell what the hell is going on. I’m running out of ideas here.”
    After having solved the first parts of the mystery with awesome speed, the team was now mired in confusion. Kuns was convinced that better insect traps and more extensive forays in the foothills around San Joaquin would eventually smoke out the culprit, but Johnson was dubious. 4