Billy entered the change room, closed the door behind him, switched from his street clothes into his government-issued pale blue lab smock, and, big virus syringe in hand, opened the door to the animal cubicle. He gazed at the animals through his tired, bloodshot eyes. Then he walked closer and squinted at them.
Oh shit — they already got it?!
Billy was startled by what he found. Two steers were stumbling around in the yellow-tiled cellblock, drooling profusely and foaming at the mouth, muttering low groans. This can't be, he thought, there's no way. Maybe he was in the wrong lab. Maybe the pounding headache was mixing him all up. No, he thought, this is the lab room I'm supposed to be in — I know it is! They have to be clean, these animals, the handlers just brought these two in here from the Old Cow Barn yesterday. The aftermath of last night's festivities was impairing his judgment. Well, there's still a little time left — let's try this over again. Perplexed, Billy rubbed his tired eyes, left the cubicle, closed the air-lock door behind, took a decontamination shower in the change room, and regrouped for a moment. The symptoms he saw bothered Billy, and with good reason: he had once contracted an exotic animal disease after accidentally injecting his cuticle with live viruses. He sat down, scanned the newspaper, and sipped some more coffee — the brief rest would sober him. Then he slowly got up and went back in.
Same thing. He looked at the weeping cattle, checked his clipboard, then looked at the animal again, shaking his head. Something was terribly wrong. He showered out and tried a third time, but same thing again.
This isn't me anymore — I've got some really sick animals in here!
Billy phoned Dr. Dardiri, who had just arrived on the later boat, and the doctor rushed up to the animal containment room. Opening each animal's jaw and inspecting their hooves, the doctor observed signs of disease in the mouth and feet and confirmed his tech's dire assessment. Dardiri called Plum Island Director Jerry Callis at 9:30 a.m. and informed him of what they discovered, noting that the animals came from the Old Cow Barn, officially known as Building 62, one of the three outside animal holding pens. Dr. Callis instructed him to swab some samples and start a laboratory diagnosis immediately.
School would be cancelled that day.
With the receiver still in his hand, Dr. Callis toggled the hook and rang Dr. Louis Jennings, the chief of animal supply, ordering him to Building 62 to see if the animals there were showing any unusual symptoms. Racing into the pens, Jennings grabbed hold of the nearest steer. It looked pretty bad — sullen-faced, the poor beast was drooling and foaming at the mouth. Around 11:00 a.m., Jennings phoned Callis and confirmed their worst fears — the very first animal he examined was ailing from…well, from something. He scraped samples of the steer's tongue tissue and gave them to a safety officer, who rushed them over to Dardiri in Lab 257.
Dr. Dardiri had long experience in diagnostic methods — he and his staff had designed scores of them for countless germs. Science, by its nature, is inexact, a constantly evolving body of knowledge among learned men and women. Identifying viruses is no different, as a microbiologist must put an unknown sample through the step-by-step process of reasoned elimination. So first, Dardiri looked at the virus's history. In this case, this step was unusually easy, because it came out of a lab upstairs, rather than from a test tube flown in from the jungles of the Congo. So the historical deductive reasoning was a snap: clear symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus meant he could proceed straight to the reagents. Normally, he'd have to grow a sample to provide enough material to set up various test cultures and find the culprit. Since there are seven strains and multiple subtypes of the virus, a bunch of reagents were brought out of the freezer. A reagent is a specific substance that reacts only to the disease substance (called the antigen) it binds it to. For example, reagents can be antibody proteins that a test mouse produces to fight a certain strain of a virus. Fluorescent antibody stains light up on a slide when they come in contact with the viruses, which are invisible to the eye (except with the help of an electron microscope). However, one can witness the known, visible reagent substance reacting to the invisible virus, which can often be identified by the ruptured cells, where they have attacked. Measuring the holes created by the dead cells indicates the potency of the virus. By manufacturing reagents using live viruses on different test animals, the Plum Island staff had assembled a veritable library of most known germs.
Pulling out the test kits from the walk-in freezer, Dr. Dardiri first tested the samples Billy extracted from the animals upstairs against each strain of FMD and a match was made: Type O-1. Then the moment of truth. The samples from Animal Supply Building No. 62 also reacted to Type O-1 virus.
Oh God — an outbreak!
Viruses had escaped from at least one of the two labs. Foot-and-mouth disease virus had broken out. Who knew what other germs had escaped and where they had gone? A rattled Dr. Dardiri left the laboratory room and typed a terse message addressed to J. J. Callis, Director: "Summary: Foot-and-mouth disease positive."
culclass="underline" 1. to pick, to gather…3. to select and separate out as inferior or worthless.
— Webster's New International Dictionary
Armies across Europe erected giant funeral pyres and set carcasses of cattle, pigs, and sheep ablaze. Open pits of fire dotted the countryside. They crackled, hissed, and popped with burning fat and flesh. Clouds of thick black smoke billowed high into the sky and traveled for miles. In the end, fifteen million animals were slaughtered over a span of four months, reduced to tons of black-gray ash and smoke. The governments called it "culling."
A plague had ravaged much of Europe and parts of the Middle East. Though it sounds like a historical account from the Middle Ages, this culling took place in February 2001. For some, the grisly images of the mass graves and carnage were reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps and Stalin's Great Purge.
The culling was a response to foot-and-mouth disease virus, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center's cause celebre.
Foot-and-mouth disease has been among us for many centuries, and maybe far longer. Some believe it was the fifth of the ten biblical plagues, the disease with which God smote Egyptian livestock. The journal of Hieronymus Fracastorius, a fifteenth-century Italian monk from Verona, noted an epidemic of cattle herds, an account that closely mirrored the disease's symptoms. It mostly attacks cloven-hoofed animals — cattle, pigs, and sheep. Large blisters form on the animal's mouth and feet, and grow up to two inches in diameter. Healthy cells underneath liquefy, and pus swells inside viral blisters until they burst, leaving behind painful ulcers. The pain of the infection on the foot renders the animal lame and immobilized. Blisters on the mouth and tongue make it impossible to eat. Compounding the problem, opportunistic bacteria enter the raw, exposed areas and cause infections ranging from the shedding of hooves and tongue to sudden death. While the virus itself rarely kills the victim, complications from it can be fatal. For many who have seen the effects of foot-and-mouth disease, it is extremely saddening to observe a stricken animal, standing helpless as its ailing body gradually wastes away.