The Hot Zone

The First Known Victims of Marburg and Ebola

The story of the world's most dangerous viruses begins with Charles Monet, a Frenchman living a quiet life in western Kenya during the late 1970s. Monet worked as a mechanic at a sugar factory near Mount Elgon, a massive extinct volcano. He preferred the company of nature and wild animals over other people, spending his free time observing birds and feeding wild monkeys near his small bungalow. On New Year’s Eve in 1980, he went on a camping trip to the mountain with a friend, a journey that led him into one of the most mysterious environments in Africa. During their trip, Monet visited Kitum Cave, a vast underground space where elephants travel deep into the darkness to mine salt from the walls. The ceiling of the cave is covered with thousands of bats, and the floor is coated in their waste, creating a unique ecosystem that likely held a hidden danger Monet could not see.

A week after returning from the mountain, Monet developed the first signs of a severe illness. It began with a persistent headache behind the eyes that aspirin could not fix. Within days, he suffered from intense fever, severe backaches, and constant vomiting. His face became a stiff, expressionless mask, his eyes turned a deep red, and his personality shifted as he became angry and confused. Inside his body, a highly infectious life form was rapidly making copies of itself by taking over his cells. The virus caused his blood to clot throughout his entire system, blocking blood flow to vital organs and causing his tissues to break down.

Seeking better medical care, Monet boarded a passenger plane to Nairobi. During the flight, his condition reached a critical point, and he began to suffer from severe internal bleeding. Upon arriving at Nairobi Hospital, his body underwent a catastrophic collapse in the waiting room. He suffered a massive loss of blood and lost consciousness as the virus destroyed the lining of his intestines. Nurses rushed him into the intensive care unit, where Dr. Shem Musoke, a young physician, took charge of the patient. In a frantic effort to save Monet, Musoke attempted to clear the patient's airway without wearing rubber gloves. Monet suddenly convulsed and vomited a mixture of black and red fluid directly into the doctor's eyes and mouth. Monet died shortly after, his internal organs having essentially liquefied.

Nine days after the incident, Dr. Musoke began to feel a dull ache in his back. His eyes turned a bright red, and he developed a high fever and intense muscle pain. As his condition worsened, his skin turned yellow with jaundice, and he suffered from the same mysterious symptoms that had killed Monet. A team of surgeons performed an exploratory operation and found that his blood had lost the ability to clot, causing every small cut to bleed uncontrollably. Realizing this was a rare and dangerous virus, another physician named Dr. David Silverstein collected samples of Musoke's blood and sent them to specialized laboratories worldwide.

The laboratory tests revealed that Musoke was infected with the Marburg virus. The virus first appeared in 1967 in Marburg, Germany, at a factory that used African green monkeys to produce vaccines. The infection had arrived hidden within a shipment of monkeys from Uganda, spreading to the factory workers and killing seven people. Marburg is part of a family called filoviruses, which look like tangled rope or snakes under a microscope. While Marburg kills about one in four people it infects, its relative Ebola Zaire kills nine out of every ten victims. Dr. Silverstein quarantined the hospital staff to prevent a massive outbreak, and fortunately, Dr. Musoke eventually recovered from the infection.