Free Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen Page B

joyously whenever he was teased or amused. Ondzie’s main job was to respond to reports of dead chimps or gorillas anywhere in the country, getting to the site as quickly as possible and taking tissue samples to be tested for Ebola virus. He described to me the tools and procedures for such a task, with the carcass invariably putrefied by the time he reached it and the presumption (until otherwise proven) that it might be seething with Ebola. His working costume was a hazmat suit with a vented hood, rubber boots, a splash apron, and three pairs of gloves, duct taped at the wrists. Making the first incision for sampling was dicey because the carcass might have become bloated with gas; it could explode. In any case the dead ape was usually covered with scavenging insects—ants, tiny flies, even bees. Ondzie told of one occasion when three bees from a carcass ran up his arms, under his hood flap, down across his bare body, and commenced to sting him as he worked on the samples. Can Ebola virus travel on the stinger of a bee? No one knows.
    Does this work frighten you? I asked Ondzie. Not anymore, he said. Why do you do it? I asked. Why do you love it? (as he clearly did). “ Ca, c’est une bonne question, ” he said, with the characteristic bob and giggle. Then he added, more soberly: Because it allows me to apply what I’ve learned, and to keep learning, and it might save some lives.
    Another member of the team was Patricia (Trish) Reed, who had come out to Africa as a biologist fifteen years earlier, studied Lassa fever and then AIDS, hired on with CIRMF in Franceville, gotten some field experience in Ethiopia, and then collected a DVM from the veterinary school at Tufts University in Boston. She was back at CIRMF, doing research on a monkey virus, when the WCS field vet working out here was killed in a plane crash coming into a backcountry Gabonese airstrip. Karesh hired Reed as the dead woman’s replacement.
    The scope of her work, Reed told me, encompassed a range of infectious diseases that threaten gorilla health, of which Ebola is only the most exotic. The others were largely human diseases of more conventional flavor, to which gorillas are susceptible because of their close genetic similarity to us: TB, poliomyelitis, measles, pneumonia, chickenpox, et cetera. Gorillas can be exposed to such infections wherever unhealthy people are walking, coughing, sneezing, and crapping in the forest. Any such spillover in the reverse direction—from humans to a nonhuman species—is known as an anthroponosis . The famous mountain gorillas, for instance, have been threatened by anthroponotic infections such as measles, carried by ecotourists who come to dote upon them. (Mountain gorillas constitute a severely endangered subspecies of the eastern gorilla, confined to the steep hillsides of the Virunga Volcanoes in Rwanda and neighboring lands. The western gorilla of Central African forests, a purely lowland species, is more numerous but far from secure.) Combined with destruction of their habitat by logging operations, and the hunting of them for bushmeat to be consumed locally or sold into markets, infectious diseases could push western gorillas from their current levels of relative abundance (maybe a hundred thousand in total) to a situation in which small, isolated populations survive tenuously, like the mountain gorillas, or go locally extinct.
    But the forests of Central Africa are still relatively vast, compared to the small Virunga hillsides that harbor mountain gorillas; and the western gorilla doesn’t face many ecotourists in its uncomfortable, nearly impenetrable home terrain. So measles and TB aren’t the worst of its problems. “I would say that, without a doubt, Ebola is the biggest threat” to the western species, Reed said.
    What makes Ebola virus among gorillas so difficult, she explained, is not just its ferocity but also the lack of data. “We don’t know if it was here before. We don’t know if they