Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come by Richard Preston

Author:Richard Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st Century, Africa, Disease & Health Issues, Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, International Relations, Medicine & Health Sciences, Science, Social Science
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-07-15T03:00:00+00:00

NGALIEMA HOSPITAL, KINSHASA

Midday, September 27

Ngaliema Hospital sits on a hill overlooking the Congo River at the lower expanse of the great Malebo Pool, a broad, sluggish detention of the river before it pours into the Great Falls of the Congo. The Ngaliema hospital is a neat arrangement of low pavilions, painted white and set around rectangular courtyards covered with grass. Sister Myriam was put in a private room in one of the pavilions, where she got sicker. She began vomiting and had episodes of diarrhea. Sister Edmonda cared for her, but she didn’t wear rubber gloves or a protective gown or mask.

Father Sleghers, the feverish father superior, got lucky. It turned out that, indeed, he did have malaria. There was nothing else in his blood except malarial parasites, and malaria medicine eventually made him better. But Sister Myriam did not have malaria, and she declined rapidly at the hospital.

J. J. Muyembé had been tracking Sister Myriam’s illness, and at the same time he had been watching the petri dishes into which he’d placed a few drops of the blood he’d collected from various people who’d been exhibiting the symptoms. Nothing yet had grown on the dishes. At this point he began to think that he might not have a good handle on the disease. It might not be transmitted through bites of mosquitoes or through oral consumption of contaminated food and liquids. It might be contagious, in fact. He phoned Sister Myriam’s attending physician at Ngaliema Hospital. “We don’t know the exact kind of disease this is,” he said to him. “We must take care, and we must be prudent.” He advised that the hospital staff take basic infectious-disease precautions with Sister Myriam. They should consider her to be potentially contagious.

“Ce n’est pas un problème,” the doctor replied—it’s not a problem. “I think it’s a simple typhoid fever.”

Muyembé was extremely busy with his duties at the university. In addition to running the microbiology lab, he was the dean of the medical school. While he was waiting for results from the petri dishes, he met with professors and students in his office and around the campus. At this time Zaire was a newly independent country, and there was a sense of optimism and energy in the air. The campus was a lively place, and Muyembé got caught up in meetings and work.

The day after he returned from his trip to Yambuku, however, he got a grim piece of news. Father Germain, the thin, older, goateed curate of the mission, who had given last rites to Sister Beata, had fallen ill. This was very disturbing. Whatever it was, it was spreading.

The next day, Sister Myriam started bleeding. Muyembé considered the advice he’d just given to the doctor at the hospital, to consider that it might be contagious. Meanwhile no colonies of typhoid bacteria had grown on the petri dishes. Therefore the disease wasn’t typhoid.

At this point he was at a loss. He also began wondering just slightly about Sister Myriam and himself.

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