If Plum Island was uninterested in West Nile virus in the past, it seems to have acquired a taste for the germ. In October 1999, on the heels of the outbreak, Lab 101 held four healthy Equus caballus, the common domestic horse. They were given intravenous injections of a West Nile virus strain obtained from Dr. McNamara's Bronx Zoo collection of frozen infected birds. Each day, as the horses progressively sickened, animal handlers examined them. The scientists noted that the virus was not detectable in the blood until thirty days postinfection, but occurred within forty-five days; all four succumbed. Autopsies were performed, and four new "horse adapted" virus strains were extracted for the Plum Island virus library. If West Nile virus is not detectable in horses for thirty days, that means the North Fork horses became infected with the virus bug in July of 1999, and perhaps earlier.
This all begs the question: did Plum Island have West Nile fever virus at the time of the outbreak? Dr. Robert Shope's Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) across Long Island Sound held twenty-seven different strains of West Nile virus in its New Haven, Connecticut, freezers until 1995, when he moved to the University of Texas and took his strains with him. YARU and Plum Island often trafficked in viruses, most notably the dangerous Rift Valley fever virus in 1977. Had Dr. Shope shared West Nile virus reference samples with his friend Plum Island director Dr. Roger Breeze — the island laboratory being the only official location where foreign animal germs like West Nile virus are supposed to be studied? When I ask him, former Plum Island director Jerry Callis says he didn't think it was in the virus repository in August 1999. "I never thought it was important enough. It's more of a mild virus, not among the serious animal virus diseases," he says, even though it appears fatal to birds. But Callis had left Plum Island in 1987 when Dr. Breeze came in. USDA official Wilda Martinez confirmed Dr. Callis's beliefs when she assured the public that West Nile wasn't studied there prior to the outbreak — but she declined to say whether the virus was in their freezers.
Former Plum Island scientist Jim House, a Cornell classmate of Dr. Andresen, thinks West Nile samples existed prior to 1999. "There were samples there, and it wasn't answered clearly to the public. They didn't honestly tell how many samples they had and that's when people started to get upset." It is certainly difficult to believe that the facility boasting the world's largest collection of animal viruses would not have the West Nile fever virus, especially given the fact that right across Long Island Sound, YARU had no less than twenty-seven strains of the germ. Too, the North Fork horse epidemic is a footprint; and the cluster of horse stables, a most inviting first rest stop for mosquitoes and birds carrying the virus and working their way west from Plum Island, down the narrow strip of the North Fork. The USDA dispatched an emergency team to Long Island to examine how many horses were infected and on which horse farms. Yet they never turned their magnifying glasses on themselves. Had the fox been guarding the henhouse?
Martinez told the New York Post in 1999 that "top security [at Plum Island] does not mean top-secret." But my requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act for a catalog of germs contained in the Plum Island virus library went denied on national security grounds.
3
1967: The Demise of the Ducks
You see, we do have an impact.
West Nile virus and Lyme disease aren't the only suspicious germ outbreaks where Plum Island is concerned. There's also the demise of the Long Island duck industry.
In 1873, New York merchants Ed McGrath and James Palmer imported white Pekin ducks from China for American food consumption. The winding creeks, kettle-hole ponds, and sandy soils of eastern Long Island were prime for duck farms. By the turn of the century, no less than thirty separate commercial flocks were raised on Long Island. At the industry's height, eight million savory Pekins were consumed in the United States annually — and Long Island produced six and a half million of them. Pekin were reared on over seventy Long Island farms, "picked" at their necks with knives, plucked, packed six to a box, and stored in walk-in freezers to await shipment. Roasted, marinated "Long Island duck" recipes became a national fancy. The name endures to this day, but the Pekin ducks do not.
The thriving Long Island duck industry was dealt a sudden fatal blow in the winter of 1967. Scores of white breeders from three months to two years old died on three adjacent farms; other ducks were trembling, becoming listless, and unable to stand upright. Instead of gaily flapping and quacking, flocks quietly sat on the ground, wings outstretched and heads down, clinical signs of physical weakness and depression. Whatever the ailment, it was highly contagious. It soon killed off well over half the flocks. The USDA swept in and took charge, ordering some six thousand ducks immediately poisoned and over fifty thousand eggs destroyed, costing local duck farmers millions of dollars. The infection was found to be the virus that caused Dutch duck plague (also called duck virus enteritis), an avian disease endemic to Holland, Belgium, India, and China. It was the first outbreak of this foreign animal disease within the United States. Two independent animal doctors who discovered the outbreak postulated how it occurred:
The detection of the disease on the American Continent invites some explanation as to origin. Had the disease been present for some time and remained undetected? Was the disease imported…? Was it introduced indirectly by traffic in infected material…? The possibility seems remote that the disease had been present on Long Island for any length of time. In the long history of the intensive duck industry on Long Island, the disease had been neither suspected nor reported.
One farm employed Dutch farmworkers and entertained Dutch tourists, but they were dubious of that connection. "It is difficult or impossible to evaluate the importance of such traffic." They were at a loss to explain such an explosive virus infection. No evidence could be found that Plum Island scientists investigated the nearby site of the outbreak, or whether they investigated a possible link between the island laboratory and the outbreak. But the USDA pamphlet "DUCK VIRUS ENTERITIS: An old world dis-ease…in the new world" maintained, "In spite of careful investigations, the source of the original U.S. outbreak has not been determined."
Three years later, the USDA announced a complete eradication of the virus. The department showered the Long Island duck farmers with awards for the important role they played in the campaign. The Plum Island virus laboratory, coincidentally nearby, had developed a vaccine for the duck farms to protect against further incursion of this exotic virus. But the plaudits and awards rang terribly hollow. The farmers had essentially participated in two eradications — that of the duck virus and of their own livelihood. With the farmers' flocks crippled by Dutch duck plague virus, Suffolk County — under strong pressure from Hamptons-area real estate interests — crushed the remaining farms. The majestic white ducks and their baby ducklings were now unwanted pests quacking and defecating in the ponds and creeks of the new Hamptons social set. Invoking "protection of the environment," the government closed duck farms, family farms that for a century were the backbone of Long Island's east end economy. "Prompt enforcement of control measures confined the outbreak to New York State," crowed the pithy USDA pamphlet.