Zookeeper Exposed to Fatal Herpes Virus Not Infected

Doctors have given a clean bill of health to Cathy Wertis, a keeper at the San Diego Zoo who spent several days awaiting results of tests to determine whether she had contracted a rare and deadly virus from a monkey during a Sept. 17 accident.

“I talked to her the other day, and her doctors consider her case closed,” zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett said Thursday.

Wertis, 21, underwent testing for herpes B after her hand was cut by a shattered glass vial filled with urine taken from an infected monkey. Doctors were confident that the woman had not contracted the virus because she failed to develop symptoms soon after the incident. The virus causes encephalitis.

Humans rarely contract the virus from infected monkeys, but when they do, “it’s a bad disease,” according to Dr. Mark Bracker, a UC San Diego Medical Center physician who helped develop a treatment program for people suspected of having the infection.

Since its discovery in 1932, the virus has proved fatal to 18 of 23 patients identified as having it.

Zoo employees rushed Wertis to the medical center just minutes after the early-morning accident at the zoo’s Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species. She was taking a routine urine sample from a monkey known to be infected with herpes B.

Wertis, who immediately washed the wound out, was treated by doctors for two days at the hospital. She earlier returned to work at the zoo, where she is a part-time employee.