Smithsonian Magazine by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2012-10-24T21:01:14.577930+00:00

The Hunt for Ebola

A CDC team races to Uganda just days after an outbreak of the killer virus to try to pinpoint exactly how it is transmitted to humans

By Joshua Hammer

Smithsonian magazine, November 2012, Subscribe

After Ebola is confirmed, doctors and scientists converge within days.

Pascale Zinten, MSF / AFP / Getty Images / Newscom

Shortly after dawn on a cool morning in late August, a three-member team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, along with two colleagues, set out in a four-wheel-drive Toyota from a hotel in central Uganda. After a 15-minute drive, they parked on a dirt road in front of an abandoned brick house. Mist shrouded the lush, hilly landscape, and fields glistened with dew. “We checked this place yesterday,” said Megan Vodzak, a Bucknell University graduate student in biology who had been invited to join the CDC mission. “We were walking around and they flew out, and we’re hoping they will have moved back in.” A cluster of schoolchildren watched, rapt, from a banana grove across the road. The team put on blue surgical gowns, caps, black leather gloves and rubber boots. They covered their faces with respirators and plastic face shields. “Protection against bat poop,” Vodzak told me. Jonathan Towner, the team leader, a lanky 46-year-old with tousled black hair and a no-nonsense manner, peeked through a cobweb-draped door frame into the dark interior. Then they got to work.

Towner—as well as Luke Nyakarahuka, an epidemiologist from the Ugandan Ministry of Health, and Brian Bird and Brian Amman, scientists with the CDC—unrolled a “mist net,” a large hairnet-like apparatus fastened to two eight-foot-tall metal poles. They stretched it across the doorway, sealing off the entrance. Towner moved to the rear of the house. Then, with a cry of “Here we go,” he hurled rocks onto the corrugated-tin roof and against metal shutters, sending a dozen panicked bats, some of them possibly infected with Ebola, toward the doorway and into the trap.

The team had arrived here from Atlanta on August 8, eleven days after confirmation of an outbreak of the Ebola virus. They brought with them 13 trunks with biohazard suits, surgical gowns, toe tags, nets, respirators and other equipment. Their mission: to discover exactly how Ebola is transmitted to human beings.

Towner had chosen as his team’s base the Hotel Starlight in Karaguuza, in Kibaale district, a fertile and undeveloped pocket of Uganda, 120 miles west of the capital, Kampala. That’s where I met them, two weeks after their arrival. For the past 13 days, they had been trapping hundreds of common Ethiopian epauletted fruit bats (Epomophorus labiatus) in caves, trees and abandoned houses, and were reaching the end of their fieldwork. Towner suspected that the creatures harbored Ebola, and he was gathering as many specimens as he could. Based on his studies of Egyptian fruit bats, which carry another lethal pathogen, known as Marburg virus, Towner calculated that between 2 and 5 percent of the epauletted fruit bats were likely to be virus carriers.

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