Inside the Hot Zone by Mark G. Kortepeter

Author:Mark G. Kortepeter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO008000 Biography & Autobiography / Military, BIO017000 Biography & Autobiography / Medical, MED022090 Medical / Infectious Diseases
Publisher: Potomac Books

The extremely high attack rate didn’t jibe with malaria, especially for marines taking malaria pills. It had the classic hallmarks of a point-source outbreak from a common exposure—like when a whole church congregation develops fever and vomiting after eating the same tainted potato salad at a church picnic. Sybil Tasker worried about Lassa, with rat urine and feces in the warehouse as the common exposure.

One of Sybil’s colleagues at NNMC, Dr. (Captain) Greg Martin, got on speed dial with the surgeon on the ship and kept in close contact over the next twenty-four hours. The surgeon told him he had looked at a blood smear from one of the sick marines and thought he saw malaria parasites. Greg was dubious. After all, most surgeons wouldn’t know how to diagnose malaria, and the marines were taking mefloquine pills already.

Diagnosing malaria with a microscope requires two drops of blood smeared and stained on a glass slide and a trained eye to recognize its sinister beauty of signet rings or headphone shapes lit up in a splash of dark red, purple, and blue inside the hockey-puck shaped red blood cells. Some species of malaria develop tiny blue stipples or transform into basket, amoeboid, or oval forms with pointy antennae. But the surgeon had taken the military’s tropical medicine class a year earlier, where he learned how to identify malaria. So Dr. Greg Martin recommended treating the febrile marines still on the ship for malaria before they got on the plane, just in case.

Greg Martin then got into a tug of war with the air force, which said it wouldn’t risk carrying marines infected with a potentially dangerous agent like Lassa, thus contaminating and knocking a multimillion-dollar plane out of commission afterward. Greg dug in his heals and pushed the argument up the chain of command. There was no way he would leave up to forty sick marines stranded in Liberia or on ships. Greg prevailed.

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