Beware the Creepy Powers of Suggestion

On a recent stormy night, I lit a fire, cracked open a bottle of Zinfandel and cozied up with what was supposed to be a scary and factual book. On the jacket, Stephen King called it “horrifying”; Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Redford each called it “terrifying.” My buddy Doug Thompson, a naturalist who loaned me the allegedly spooky volume, had called it “really scary.”

The book is called “The Hot Zone,” and it was written by Richard Preston. (Redford was supposed to star in the film version--”Crisis in the Hot Zone”--but recently backed out of the project.) It’s about killer viruses originating in the rain forests of Africa and traveling outward from there to infect and kill people. Specifically, they seem to originate in a place called Kitum Cave, on Mt. Elgon in Kenya.

Apparently, these viruses have been lurking in the fecund crannies of the African rain forests for much longer than Homo sapiens has been walking the Earth. They are filoviruses, which means they have long tails. Four have been discovered: Marburg, Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan and Ebola Reston. They are Biosafety Level Four Agents, which in the parlance of biohazardry is the most lethal. (HIV is a Level Two agent.) Scientists will not so much as enter an area in which Ebola virus is suspected without donning fully pressurized “space suits” that keep the wearer from contact with anything in the environment.

Here is why. Seven days after you’ve become host to an Ebola Zaire virus, you get a headache that won’t go away. Then you get a bodyache that is punishingly painful. Then your eyes turn red. Then your face muscles go slack and you take on a “zombie-like” appearance.

Then you become mean, listless and abstracted. Then you start bleeding out of your nose.

Then your ears, eyes, mouth and assorted other orifices start bleeding. Then you start vomiting astonishing amounts of a red-black liquid that smells like a slaughterhouse. Then the bleeding turns to acute hemorrhaging. Within a week of exposure you are turned into a human-shaped bag of virus- drenched blood that eventually bursts and sends you into eternity in a putrescent explosion that jets millions upon millions of hungry Ebola viruses into the atmosphere, where they hope to find their next host.

After reading this far in the book, I poured myself quite a bit more wine. I noticed my headache. I wondered if I might have picked up Ebola Zaire just by reading about it, but that seemed silly.

It didn’t seem that silly, though, after what I read next. Namely, that 1) nobody knows where these filoviruses live when they are not in people, 2) nobody knows how they are transmitted to or between people, 3) some of these cunning little predators are capable of changing their RNA reproductive codes almost instantly in order to successfully infect their current host and 4) approximately 100 million of these viruses could fit comfortably on the period at the end of this sentence.

I did have a headache, and, now that I came to think of it, kind of a bodyache too. Could a virus be blood-borne, air-borne, word-borne or perhaps even idea-borne? By the time I’d read this far, I was almost witless with worry. I guzzled more wine, then went to the refrigerator for a snack that might give me the nutritional power to ward off a possible Ebola “amplification.”

What I saw in the fridge, however, were a hundred places where Ebola might hide. I gazed with a sinking soul at the oldish jars of jams and jellies, the never-finished salad dressings, the arcane baking flours, exotic vinegars, all the leftover holiday junk that you never get around to opening. It was pretty obvious that Ebola was in there somewhere, waiting.

Two hours later, panting, I finished the complete refrigerator sterilization. I’d thrown away everything except the new milk and beer, and scrubbed the whole interior with a noxious combination of bleach and water. (In “The Hot Zone,” bleach is used as a disinfectant.) I turned the temperature control knob all the way to “coldest.”

I then sped back to the book to read some more before bed. I savored Preston’s description of Kitum Cave in Kenya, where at least two of the known victims of Ebola Zaire are believed to have been exposed. Kitum Cave is a big primeval hole on the side of Mt. Elgon, itself a long-dormant volcano. For centuries, the elephants of Mt. Elgon have marched into this cave at night, using their tusks to scrape the walls for the salt that is so hard to find in a rain forest.

Elephants aren’t the only visitors to Kitum Cave. Bats fly in and out, roosting on the ceiling. Leopards visit some evenings in search of prey. Hyrax scurry about, as do bush-buck, red duikers, monkeys and Genet cats. Moths, spiders and stinging insects abound. The floors teem with invisible life--amoebic, bacterial and, yes, viral.

Here is Preston’s superb summation of the cave:

“Kitum Cave is Mt. Elgon’s equivalent of the Times Square subway station. It is an underground traffic zone, a biological mixing point where different species of animals and insects cross one another’s path in an enclosed air space. A nice place for a virus to jump species.”

I slept miserably, with distressing dreams of foul, dank places crawling with Ebola viruses racing into my pores, shooting down my nasal passages into the soft tissue of my lungs, crawling along my throat, edging in through the cracks of my eyelids.

I woke up early and kept reading. My headache was still with me, though the idea came to mind that this could have been due to wine instead of Ebola Zaire. The bodyache was hanging on, too, but it certainly wasn’t the first time I’d had one after a night of lousy sleep. I checked my eyes in the mirror--no red, yet. I finished the book, then went into my study to get some work done and was confronted with a horror.

My dogs had snuck into the study during the storm-battered night, tracking in plenty of mud and rainwater. It was obvious that they had pretty much partied all night--wadding up the throw rugs, knocking over the wastebasket, depositing what the faint of heart used to call “No. 2.” I stood in the doorway and glared at their guilty faces, then let my eyes roam the veritable Kitum Cave they’d made of the room. I could practically hear the Ebola Zaire replicating in the dog-stinking mess. Oh, my.

I spent the next two hours scrubbing every item in the room, including the fire extinguisher. I hit the carpet stains with the same bleach-water solution that had been so effective on the refrigerator. I slammed the door and went out to the living room to read up again on the conditions of Kitum Cave. Was there even a remote chance that I’d actually eradicated the killer virus from my house?

A few minutes later, I crept back to the door, opened it and looked in. Except for the dizzying yellow comets bleached by my brush strokes into an otherwise beige carpet, everything looked fine. I lifted my nose and caught the faint aroma of Clorox and dog. I shut the door quietly, fingers crossed.

The headache and bodyache passed, and a week later I was out of the known incubation period for Ebola Zaire. I’m planning to return “The Hot Zone” to Doug and am keeping it in my sterile refrigerator until he can come and get it.