MEDICINE : Texas Ebola Scare Is Over, but Coast Isn’t Completely Clear

The five doctors, clad head-to-toe as if in outer space, padded into the cinder-block building and gazed at the wire cages lining the walls. Forty-eight macaques peered curiously back. Seemingly sensing their fate, the usually playful monkeys were eerily subdued.

One by one, the macaques were placed on a metal cart that served as a makeshift operating table. A strong sedative, Ketamine, induced deep sleep as a latex-gloved physician sliced through the animal’s flesh and extracted tissue samples from every internal organ, the skin and testicles. Finally, a lethal dose was injected directly into the monkey’s heart.

By day’s end, all 48 had been dissected, their tissues cataloged for further study, their carcasses incinerated. A powerful ammonia bomb would permeate the windowless operating room and disinfect the wire cages.

Possible exposure to a variant of the Ebola virus that killed 245 people in Zaire last year necessitated the monkeys’ slaughter last week. Everything they had touched was destroyed. Investigators were determined to ensure that the virus would go no further than the Texas Primate Center, a facility on the outskirts of rural Alice that imported the animals from the Philippines last month. All that remained were the tissue samples, carefully sealed and frozen in plastic tubes, ready for scientific analysis far removed from the dusty cotton fields of South Texas.

It was, said Texas Department of Health epidemiologist Dr. Ben Barnett, a temporary triumph over a deadly virus for which there is no cure. “Ebola is a mystery. No one knows where it exists in nature, where it came from or where it goes. To contain it here shows that our system works.”

The Alice outbreak was discovered last week when one monkey in a shipment of 100 from the Philippines died after days of lethargy. A second monkey with similar symptoms was euthanized.

Tests revealed an Ebola strain virtually identical to the virus that swept through a monkey center in Reston, Va., in a 1989 crisis that became the basis of the book “Hot Zone.”

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state health agency assured the 19,788 residents of Alice that the Reston Ebola was harmless to humans. Under an electron microscope, the Zaire and Reston Ebolas look the same--an elongated squiggle with a tail. A small difference in the genetic sequence is believed to account for humans’ apparent resistance to the Reston strain. The human Ebola virus kills about 80% of those it infects. It destroys capillary and blood vessel linings, prompting fluids to drain out of the circulatory system.

Alice has also been visited recently by killer bees and a rabies outbreak, which may account for the casual local reaction to the Ebola scare.

“I feel like they’re professionals, so let them take care of it and leave them alone,” said Alma Gonzales, 54, as she folded towels at the Wash Tub #3 laundry on the town’s main drag.

The monkey farm, as it is called here, is seven miles outside of Alice, down cryptically marked country roads. Just when you think you’re lost, there is the shining apparition as the sun reflects off hundreds of silver metal Quonset huts. The clusters of structures house about 5,000 monkeys, which are sold for medical research.

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The Texas monkeys exposed to Ebola never made it to these huts. As with all animals imported here, the group that arrived in wooden crates last month were quarantined.

Eight primate center employees, dressed in full protective clothing, were theoretically exposed to Ebola when the monkeys were fed. These staffers continue to work by day and go home to their families at night. “The only difference is they’re regularly monitored for changes in temperature,” said Texas Department of Health epidemiologist Kate Hendricks.

“We don’t believe they will get sick because the workers in Reston who tested positive for the antigen did not get sick,” Barnett said. “But we’re not willing to make that leap of faith absolutely, so the monitoring will continue.”