It’s a little known fact, or perhaps a dark matter best forgotten, but the child care facility on Isaac Newton Square in Reston, Va., was once the epicenter of a new strain of Ebola. As cars rush by the suburban landscape just 20 minutes from the nation’s capital, it’s hard to imagine that 25 years ago, soldiers in spacesuits were moving in and out of a “monkey house” there – a building where primates shipped into the U.S. for research were quarantined by a private company, Hazelton Research Products, before being delivered to laboratories across the country. But the monkeys there were dying. And as it turned out, they were dying from Ebola. Specialists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRID) not far away in Frederick County, Md., made the initial diagnosis. After consulting with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), they led a team of specialists and soldiers from an animal unit to euthanize the monkeys and test them, as well as sterilize Hazelton. It was December 1989. The CDC was also on the ground – to make sure the monkey handlers at Hazelton were not infected, too. They weren’t.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:45:59 +0000