From Amazon
Books such as Richard Preston's The Hot Zone thrust the deadly Ebola virus into the spotlight, but they can't match the first-person perspective of Virus Hunter. Author C. J. Peters is an ex-army colonel who has spent his professional life studying deadly pathogens in the lab and in the wild. He spins a drama- and adrenaline-filled true tale of virus hunters, which is gripping despite its occasional tendency to grow verbose and detour into personal history. Peters offers a look at crippling diseases not only through the eyes of a scientist, but also with the perspective of an insider in the defense establishment, painting a chilling picture of the potential of biological terrorism or outright warfare.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Richard Preston's best-selling The Hot Zone (LJ 8/94) dramatized the 1989 Ebola outbreak among monkeys in Reston, Virginia, and described conflicts between the two men most responsible for dealing with the outbreak, Joe McCormick of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and C.J. Peters of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Eventually, McCormick left the CDC, and Peters assumed his former position there. Now both men have published their sides of the story in their respective memoirs. McCormick's Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC (LJ 7/96) is a somewhat disjointed but gripping account of hair-raising adventures investigating such deadly diseases as Ebola and Lassa Fever in Africa and elsewhere. Peters's adventures, while often exciting, can't match McCormick's in number and variety, but his book is more smoothly written and provides an interesting overview of its author's career and education in the workings of medical bureaucracies. He also provides important insights into the mentality at USAMRIID, formerly a biological warfare center. As Peters reminds us, some emerging diseases possess horrifying potential as agents of biological warfare. Recommended for general readers.?Marit MacArthur, Auraria Lib., Denver
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
If Preston's Hot Zone (1994) and Garrett's Coming Plague (1994) were popular among your patrons, this latest entry in the "true horror" genre is likely to have appeal. Coauthor Peters headed disease assessment at the U.S. Army's Maryland (USAMRIID) operation when it handled the monkey filovirus outbreak in Reston, Virginia, which was central to Preston's best-selling book. As the Centers for Disease Control's chief of viral special pathogens, Peters played a leading role in identifying the hantavirus that hit the Four Corners region of the U.S. desert Southwest in the early '90s. (Olshaker is a writer who previously coauthored a best-selling study of FBI profiling, MindHunter [1995].) Virus Hunter traces Peters' career studying these obscure life-forms; it's full of details about generally ignored medical struggles in less-industrialized nations and warnings about the myriad human factors--from crowded slums, agricultural monocultures, and bureaucratic infighting to reduced science funding and managed health care--that make a future viral disaster possible, perhaps probable. Mary Carroll
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
A virologist's breezy account of a career spent battling deadly diseases in the lab and in the field. Peters, now the chief of special pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and novelist Olshaker (Blood Race, 1989, etc.) have the knack of writing about T-cells and antibodies with clarity and vigor. Peters's colorful account of his field work in Central America, where as a brand-new doctor he studied tropical viruses with the US Public Health Service, evokes images of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Later he joined the US Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, and it was as chief of its infectious diseases division that he played a major role in containing the 1989 Reston (Va.) Ebola outbreak that was the subject of Richard Preston's bestseller The Hot Zone. Peters, no shrinking violet, offers a different perspective on that terrifying episode--one more sympathetic to the army--than the one presented by Preston. And in the immediacy of his narrative, lab work takes on a high level of excitement. In his present position with the CDC, he has major concerns about the threat of lethal new viruses. He warns that if another incident like the outbreak at Reston were to occur today we would not be much better prepared. He worries, too, about biological terrorism, for his years with the army have made him aware of its potential horrors. Peters offers some concrete suggestions for how to prepare for these eventualities, such as global surveillance and the establishment of hospital procedures for large-scale emergencies. He also urges that scientists get a better handle on viruses and work out the basics of a vaccine or drug therapy for each viral family. As entertaining as an adventure novel, but with a deadly serious message, this is a valuable addition to the growing body of literature on emerging viruses. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
"Virus Hunter is a terrific book, at the top of my list. The adventure of a lifetime, it's the inside story of the hunt for threatening and emerging viruses, told with grace and clarity by a working scientist at the hot center of his field. C.J. Peters has had leadership roles in the army and now at the CDC, and he has much to tell that's never been told before."
--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone
From the Hardcover edition.
--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Publisher
"Virus Hunter is a terrific book, at the top of my list. The adventure of a lifetime, it's the inside story of the hunt for threatening and emerging viruses, told with grace and clarity by a working scientist at the hot center of his field. C.J. Peters has had leadership roles in the army and now at the CDC, and he has much to tell that's never been told before."
--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There's an old adage in medicine that goes something like this: Common things occur commonly. Uncommon things don't. Therefore, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
Each of us has a worst nightmare, the kind of fevered dream that wakes us up in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by the sheer physical relief of realizing this dark and vivid reverie isn't real. Mine has to do with the zebras. What if the hoofbeats, this time, aren't horses? What happens if a deadly virus for which we have no treatment or cure explodes into the middle of a major city?
On Monday morning, November 27, 1989, it looked like my nightmare was coming to life.
I was in my office at USAMRIID--the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland--preparing for a meeting I didn't want to go to. As chief of the Disease Assessment Division, one of my many responsibilities was to distinguish between outbreaks of common, treatable bugs and rare, unknown diseases, between the horses and the zebras. Disease Assessment was a new division at RIID, housed in a temporary building, a prefab structure thrown up on a concrete slab. When any of us had to go to the bathroom, we had to go to other buildings, and until they caught us, we used to empty our coffeepots out the fire escape. By government logic, if our temporary facility had had plumbing, it would have been a permanent building and Congress on high would have had to approve it.
My colleague Peter Jahrling and I had different philosophies about difficult meetings. I put them off as long as I could, but once I schedule them, I go. Peter, the division's senior research scientist, would schedule anything in a heartbeat but would then try to find some excuse at the last minute not to go. This was one neither one of us wanted to go to: a meeting in Rockville on the simian immunodeficiency virus (or SIV) project with Don Burke and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research people. They were top-notch scientists and had the same goals we did, but we had disagreements with them about the science, the funding, and the politics. But the bottom line was that simian immunodeficiency was a good model for studying HIV, and so it was an important project. If we could get some insight into the mechanism of disease in monkeys, it could help us figure out how to treat it in humans, and this could also be a real breakthrough for vaccine development. Peter and I had made a deal with each other that no matter what else came up, we'd both go to all the meetings.
About ten minutes before we had to leave for the half-hour drive to the suburb north of Washington, D.C., I was rummaging around my office checking to make sure my uniform had all its costume jewelry in the right places. I've never been a very snappy dresser, maybe because it was so hot in West Texas, where I grew up. I've always favored jeans and bright-colored shirts with strong prints rather than a regular uniform--a habit not always appreciated by my superiors in the military hierarchy. But I had picked up a tenacious form of athlete's foot fungus years before, working in the jungles of Central America, which I used as my excuse for wearing casual clothes and sandals with white socks to the office. I didn't start wearing a uniform regularly until I became a colonel, at which point I had to start setting a "good example" for the others. I still wasn't very good at it, though, and every time I had to represent RIID to the outside world, I had to double-check to make sure everything was where it belonged.
When Peter showed up at my door, I thought he'd come with some excuse why he couldn't go. With him was Tom Geisbert, a twenty-seven-year-old grad student Peter had just recruited away from John White in pathology to give us electron microscopy capability. John had worked with Tom's father, an engineer, "behind the fence" in the old days when Detrick housed the army's secret biological warfare program.
Tom was holding a manila folder. "C.J.," Peter said, "you need to take a look at this."
Tom handed me the folder. There were several eight-by-ten glossy photos inside. Electron micrographs. As I flipped through them, inner alarm bells were beginning to sound.
Peter gave me a minute, then asked, "What does this look like to you?"
I saw rod-like particles in the cells, some curved at the end like a shepherd's crook, others in bizarrely twisted shapes. "It looks like a filovirus," I responded apprehensively. I was suddenly gripped by what we refer to as "the pucker factor," an uncomfortable and unpleasant tightening of certain sphincter musculature. "Where does it come from?"
"These are the samples from Reston, Virginia."
Oh shit, I thought. I knew that Dan Dalgard, the supervising veterinarian for Hazelton Research Products over there, had contacted Peter after some of his monkeys started dying at their primate quarantine unit. Reston was an upper-middle-class bedroom community, one of the first of the "new towns," about twenty miles outside Washington, D.C.
Hazelton imported macaques from the Philippines for medical research throughout the United States. It isn't unusual for a few monkeys from a shipment to die during the quarantine period before they can be certified disease-free and sent out to the labs. But normally, when they die it's either something so vague that you never find out what the cause was, or they have weight loss and diarrhea before they die of dysentery. These monkeys were bleeding internally and externally before dying a very unpleasant, dramatic death. They had firm, enlarged spleens, which probably meant they were packed full of white blood cells, a healthy immune response. Dissecting the organs had been like cutting through sausage. Equally troubling to Dan Dalgard, all the bleeding deaths had occurred in one room--Room F--of the single-story, brick-faced quarantine facility. He was worried he was dealing with an outbreak of simian hemorrhagic fever (SHF), a disease which doesn't affect humans but is absolutely devastating to certain species of monkeys. He had sent samples from all the monkeys that had died in Room F over to Peter to work up, looking for SHF virus. And they'd found some.
Electron microscopy requires hours of careful processing of tissue or cells by a skilled technician before the test can be carried out. Looking at the slides under the electron microscope, Tom had discovered something else disturbing the cells, and it sure as hell looked like a filovirus. There were only two known filoviruses--Marburg and, even worse news, Ebola, two of the deadliest of the African hemorrhagic fevers. Both caused the kind of symptoms the monkeys in Room F were dying from. Only they caused it in human beings.
The first documented outbreak of a filovirus had occurred at a vaccine factory in Marburg, Germany, during the summer of 1967. Three employees thought they'd come down with the flu. But by the next day they'd developed severe diarrhea and spreading rashes. Then they started vomiting blood.
And that wasn't as bad as Marburg's sister virus: Ebola. During the summer of 1976, 318 people came down with Ebola in a remote area of Zaire. Two hundred and eighty of them died horribly, including nurses and Belgian missionary nuns who tended the sick in the remote village hospitals. Ebola produces one of the worst deaths I can imagine.
Tom's discovery had suddenly become a major pucker factor.
"How do you know this isn't just a lab contaminant?" I pressed Peter.
"There's no other Marburg or Ebola in the lab," he said.
Oh shit, I thought again.
There are four laboratory levels of biological containment, each one keyed to the potential threat to human life. The lowest Biosafety Level, BSL 1, is for organisms or agents not known to cause disease. BSL 2 is for viruses and bacteria which cause only mild disease or are difficult to contract in a laboratory setting, such as diseases which don't transmit by aerosols. In BSL 3 the bets are higher. It's constructed as a "box within a box," featuring constant one-way airflow to keep the germs inside, and laminar flow hooded work stations to protect gowned and gloved researchers against organisms which cause serious or fatal disease, such as rabies or Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but for which vaccines or treatment is available. BSL 4, the maximum containment lab, is the hottest of the hot zones. Here researchers who've undergone a battery of inoculations move about in full-body "space suits" connected to a constant air supply and wear double gloves taped to their sleeves as they examine and work with life-threatening biological agents like Ebola virus for which there is no vaccine, no magic bullet drug, and no cure. Decontamination tanks and filters are designed to kill off any biohazard waste from the lab before it reaches the outside world. Work in the BSL 4 lab is gut-checking, high-stakes science, where any oversight or slip-up can have disastrous consequences. It takes a particular personality, going far beyond scientific ability, to work regularly in maximum containment. There are only two Level 4 labs in the United States--one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the other at USAMRIID.
"Have you been working up any other human samples from Afric...
Each of us has a worst nightmare, the kind of fevered dream that wakes us up in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by the sheer physical relief of realizing this dark and vivid reverie isn't real. Mine has to do with the zebras. What if the hoofbeats, this time, aren't horses? What happens if a deadly virus for which we have no treatment or cure explodes into the middle of a major city?
On Monday morning, November 27, 1989, it looked like my nightmare was coming to life.
I was in my office at USAMRIID--the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland--preparing for a meeting I didn't want to go to. As chief of the Disease Assessment Division, one of my many responsibilities was to distinguish between outbreaks of common, treatable bugs and rare, unknown diseases, between the horses and the zebras. Disease Assessment was a new division at RIID, housed in a temporary building, a prefab structure thrown up on a concrete slab. When any of us had to go to the bathroom, we had to go to other buildings, and until they caught us, we used to empty our coffeepots out the fire escape. By government logic, if our temporary facility had had plumbing, it would have been a permanent building and Congress on high would have had to approve it.
My colleague Peter Jahrling and I had different philosophies about difficult meetings. I put them off as long as I could, but once I schedule them, I go. Peter, the division's senior research scientist, would schedule anything in a heartbeat but would then try to find some excuse at the last minute not to go. This was one neither one of us wanted to go to: a meeting in Rockville on the simian immunodeficiency virus (or SIV) project with Don Burke and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research people. They were top-notch scientists and had the same goals we did, but we had disagreements with them about the science, the funding, and the politics. But the bottom line was that simian immunodeficiency was a good model for studying HIV, and so it was an important project. If we could get some insight into the mechanism of disease in monkeys, it could help us figure out how to treat it in humans, and this could also be a real breakthrough for vaccine development. Peter and I had made a deal with each other that no matter what else came up, we'd both go to all the meetings.
About ten minutes before we had to leave for the half-hour drive to the suburb north of Washington, D.C., I was rummaging around my office checking to make sure my uniform had all its costume jewelry in the right places. I've never been a very snappy dresser, maybe because it was so hot in West Texas, where I grew up. I've always favored jeans and bright-colored shirts with strong prints rather than a regular uniform--a habit not always appreciated by my superiors in the military hierarchy. But I had picked up a tenacious form of athlete's foot fungus years before, working in the jungles of Central America, which I used as my excuse for wearing casual clothes and sandals with white socks to the office. I didn't start wearing a uniform regularly until I became a colonel, at which point I had to start setting a "good example" for the others. I still wasn't very good at it, though, and every time I had to represent RIID to the outside world, I had to double-check to make sure everything was where it belonged.
When Peter showed up at my door, I thought he'd come with some excuse why he couldn't go. With him was Tom Geisbert, a twenty-seven-year-old grad student Peter had just recruited away from John White in pathology to give us electron microscopy capability. John had worked with Tom's father, an engineer, "behind the fence" in the old days when Detrick housed the army's secret biological warfare program.
Tom was holding a manila folder. "C.J.," Peter said, "you need to take a look at this."
Tom handed me the folder. There were several eight-by-ten glossy photos inside. Electron micrographs. As I flipped through them, inner alarm bells were beginning to sound.
Peter gave me a minute, then asked, "What does this look like to you?"
I saw rod-like particles in the cells, some curved at the end like a shepherd's crook, others in bizarrely twisted shapes. "It looks like a filovirus," I responded apprehensively. I was suddenly gripped by what we refer to as "the pucker factor," an uncomfortable and unpleasant tightening of certain sphincter musculature. "Where does it come from?"
"These are the samples from Reston, Virginia."
Oh shit, I thought. I knew that Dan Dalgard, the supervising veterinarian for Hazelton Research Products over there, had contacted Peter after some of his monkeys started dying at their primate quarantine unit. Reston was an upper-middle-class bedroom community, one of the first of the "new towns," about twenty miles outside Washington, D.C.
Hazelton imported macaques from the Philippines for medical research throughout the United States. It isn't unusual for a few monkeys from a shipment to die during the quarantine period before they can be certified disease-free and sent out to the labs. But normally, when they die it's either something so vague that you never find out what the cause was, or they have weight loss and diarrhea before they die of dysentery. These monkeys were bleeding internally and externally before dying a very unpleasant, dramatic death. They had firm, enlarged spleens, which probably meant they were packed full of white blood cells, a healthy immune response. Dissecting the organs had been like cutting through sausage. Equally troubling to Dan Dalgard, all the bleeding deaths had occurred in one room--Room F--of the single-story, brick-faced quarantine facility. He was worried he was dealing with an outbreak of simian hemorrhagic fever (SHF), a disease which doesn't affect humans but is absolutely devastating to certain species of monkeys. He had sent samples from all the monkeys that had died in Room F over to Peter to work up, looking for SHF virus. And they'd found some.
Electron microscopy requires hours of careful processing of tissue or cells by a skilled technician before the test can be carried out. Looking at the slides under the electron microscope, Tom had discovered something else disturbing the cells, and it sure as hell looked like a filovirus. There were only two known filoviruses--Marburg and, even worse news, Ebola, two of the deadliest of the African hemorrhagic fevers. Both caused the kind of symptoms the monkeys in Room F were dying from. Only they caused it in human beings.
The first documented outbreak of a filovirus had occurred at a vaccine factory in Marburg, Germany, during the summer of 1967. Three employees thought they'd come down with the flu. But by the next day they'd developed severe diarrhea and spreading rashes. Then they started vomiting blood.
And that wasn't as bad as Marburg's sister virus: Ebola. During the summer of 1976, 318 people came down with Ebola in a remote area of Zaire. Two hundred and eighty of them died horribly, including nurses and Belgian missionary nuns who tended the sick in the remote village hospitals. Ebola produces one of the worst deaths I can imagine.
Tom's discovery had suddenly become a major pucker factor.
"How do you know this isn't just a lab contaminant?" I pressed Peter.
"There's no other Marburg or Ebola in the lab," he said.
Oh shit, I thought again.
There are four laboratory levels of biological containment, each one keyed to the potential threat to human life. The lowest Biosafety Level, BSL 1, is for organisms or agents not known to cause disease. BSL 2 is for viruses and bacteria which cause only mild disease or are difficult to contract in a laboratory setting, such as diseases which don't transmit by aerosols. In BSL 3 the bets are higher. It's constructed as a "box within a box," featuring constant one-way airflow to keep the germs inside, and laminar flow hooded work stations to protect gowned and gloved researchers against organisms which cause serious or fatal disease, such as rabies or Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but for which vaccines or treatment is available. BSL 4, the maximum containment lab, is the hottest of the hot zones. Here researchers who've undergone a battery of inoculations move about in full-body "space suits" connected to a constant air supply and wear double gloves taped to their sleeves as they examine and work with life-threatening biological agents like Ebola virus for which there is no vaccine, no magic bullet drug, and no cure. Decontamination tanks and filters are designed to kill off any biohazard waste from the lab before it reaches the outside world. Work in the BSL 4 lab is gut-checking, high-stakes science, where any oversight or slip-up can have disastrous consequences. It takes a particular personality, going far beyond scientific ability, to work regularly in maximum containment. There are only two Level 4 labs in the United States--one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the other at USAMRIID.
"Have you been working up any other human samples from Afric...
