19 September 1976
Dearest Sisters:
I have to let you know the bad news. Sister Lucie is very ill. There is an epidemic over here. The doctors have not yet found what it is. Each day is like a month. Lucie has been confined to bed since Wednesday with a high fever, which does not fall. She has inflammation of all mucous membranes and her throat, vomits constantly, and has black stool…
Do not come over. Surely barriers to isolate our area will be put up soon. More than twenty people have died at the hospital. We do not know how many more in surrounding villages.
I first heard of Ebola in 1994, as I listened to Fresh Aire on NPR one afternoon. Teri Gross was interviewing the author Richard Preston on his new book The Hot Zone about a form of Ebola that traveled to Reston, Virginia (right outside Washington, DC) in some lab monkeys. Fascinated by the interview, I picked up the book several days later and was utterly horrified by what I read. It was hard to believe that any disease could do what was described in that book. If you have not read it, I will caution you ahead of time to eat nothing beforehand. Especially for the first chapter.
Sister Veronica wrote the letter above to friends during the Ebola epidemic in Zaire in 1976. The fever which would become known as Ebola Zaire (to differentiate it from Ebola Sudan, which was loose across the border only a few months previously) crept slowly out of the forest and proceeded to wreak havoc in the Catholic mission in Yambuku, Zaire. A local teacher, Mabalo Lokela, was the first to arrive at the Belgian mission with a high fever and other mild symptoms. Sister Lucie gave him an injection of an anti-malarial drug and wiped off her needle, never dreaming that she would be spreading the infectious agent to several hundred Zairean nationals and the clergy at the mission.
William Close’s Ebola is a nightmare come to life. It chronicles the full story of the first known outbreak of Ebola Zaire and the hurry by CDC and other international agencies to control the disease after they realized what they were dealing with.
Classified as a Filovirus, Ebola is grouped in the same family as Marburg, Lassa Fever, and Ebola Sudan. These hemorrhagic viruses were first noticed in the mid 1960s when a shipment of lab monkeys in Marburg, Germany killed several of the lab workers who dealt with them. After that, all hemorrhagic viruses were compared against Marburg for a match of antibodies. Unfortunately, all of the known viruses that have emerged since then have been different strains.
The main character is Sister Veronica. She watches the death of her best friend, Sister Lucie, a midwife at the mission, then Sister Matilda. Sister Fermina is sent on a plane to Kinshasa to see if the illness can be analyzed, but unfortunately she dies in Kinshasa. Father Gerard and several of the male nurses die, as do natives who come to the hospital for treatment. Finally, after visits from Belgian, Swiss, South African, French, and American doctors, the virus disappears as mysteriously as it began. But the trail of death through Africa has been repeated many times over since then.
For readers with weak stomachs, I will not go into the descriptions of what Ebola can do. You may have read these already. You may have read the Hot Zone. Simply know that this book is a terrifying account of a medical ordeal, with all the graphic description of the blood, bodily functions, and gore that must accompany an epidemic in primitive conditions. (Although the actual medical processes occurring within the human body are not quite as vividly horrific as those in The Hot Zone) The story is real, but it has been put into fictional form, with the author providing dialogue which may or may not have occurred between characters.
William T. Close was in Zaire during the epidemic. He also happens to be the father of actress Glenn Close. He provides a helpful glossary of foreign terms in the back of the book to help you translate French and Lingala (a Bantu dialect). I appreciated the fact that many of the African phrases were used in the body of the book. It made it seem much more real hearing the actual tongue spoken. And the accounts of tribal elders, medicine men, and the souls of the ancestors give a real glimpse into the primitive culture the nuns were working against. Not only could they not save the natives, but the natives’ own elders told them that the Europeans were killing them (and in some ways they were correct).
Skillfully told, and only partially overdramatized. Paperback price $5.99.
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