A bug in a rug

Afew years ago in San Francisco, I picked up Germs from a secondhand bookshop. Three New York Times journalists, including a Pulitzer- winning science writer, William Broad, wrote the quaintly titled 380- page research. Published in 2001, its stated purpose was to investigate and hold forth on the burning topic of the days: Biological weapons and America's secret war. With the current Ebola outbreak in western Africa, I finally remembered to open the book. There are some interesting observations on the deadly virus.

Apart from references to Ebola it has other topics of riveting interest, all bullet- pointed with a sense of purpose. How the CIA secretly built and tested germ bomblets, alarming American officials who felt the work violated the treaty banning biological weapons. How the Pentagon embarked on a secret effort to make a superbug.

The book also has “details” about the Soviet Union’s massive hidden programme to produce biological weapons, including charges at the time that germs were tested on humans, how Moscow’s scientists made an untraceable germ that instructs the body to destroy itself. A plan by the US military in the 1960s to attack Cuba with germ weapons is as good a topic as any to catch the reader’s eye. President Clinton is among hundreds of officials and scientists interviewed.

Let me, however, stay with Ebola, not least because of concern for South Asia: what if the virus travelled to our overpopulated cities and/ or mutated into something more readily contagious?

Rumours and viruses travel at breakneck speed in South Asia. Occasionally they splice into a single formidable entity and it becomes difficult to divine one from the other. In the first week of August 1994, health officials reported unusually large numbers of deaths of domestic rats in an Indian village 150 km southeast of Surat city in Gujarat. On Sept. 21, 1994, the medical watchdog in Surat city received a report that a patient had died seemingly due to pneumonic plague. Then someone informed the authorities about 10 deaths in a residential area the same day.

Around 50 seriously ill patients were admitted to the Surat hospital. This triggered the biggest post- Independence migration of people in India with around 300,000 people leaving Surat city in two days. In the rest of India antibiotics such as tetracycline and medical masks disappeared into the black market.

In a country where rumours of a benign deity guzzling milk for an entire day could trigger a nationwide race to the temples, it is a miracle of sorts that the poliovirus could be successfully weeded out. It took dollops of native genius of tenacious caregivers, however, to overcome local resistance to the vaccine, which came chiefly from the backward Muslim communities of western Uttar Pradesh.

There is this story about a determined Unicef scout who administered the suspicious drops to a hen at the behest of a wary housewife. If the hen laid an egg the next morning, the entire community of Muslim women would take their babies to the polio clinic. The terrifying gamble paid off, but it was a hugely calculated risk. The scout hailed from the local community and she was certain about the egg- laying season for the hens.

Regarding the Ebola virus, on the other hand, the mystery seems to be wrapped in enigma for the opposite reason. People are dying because mysteriously enough there is no vaccine. It was in 1976 when a Belgian scientist began to study Ebola. That was more than four decades ago, and we still have not been given an antidote to the scourge.

Could the apparent frustration of the world community with the current Ebola menace be linked with a 1988 research by investigative journalist Charles Piller and a University of California microbiologist Keith R. Yamamoto? With material acquired through the Freedom of Information Act they wrote Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies. The study cautioned vociferously against America’s quest to create a superbug. The writers compelled the Congress to investigate the matter. “We knew the Russians had sent people to Africa trying to collect Ebola and Marburg viruses,” reacted Philip K. Russell, the then head of the US Army’s medical research and development command at Fort Detrick. Russell had ordered studies of the exotic viruses after reading intelligence reports that the Soviets were aggressively pursuing them. “That was good enough for us,” he said.

At Fort Detrick, a specially designed ventilation system kept the air pressure slightly lower than the outside air. If any microbes were accidentally released, they would be sucked back into the lab. Only “hot” agents like Ebola, “for which there is no treatment, are handled more carefully”.

Unfortunately, for Africa, the Big Power rivalries that led to the perverse drive to harm its people and others with natural or manufactured germs did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the trauma of colonialism has mutated into a renewed hunt for natural resources and related conquests across the continent. Delhi’s respected Down To Earth journal, which deals with the environment, including its commercial depredation through the politics of patents, recently raised pointed questions on the Ebolarelated research. “Curious reports are emerging of the patents the US holds on a certain strain of the virus and the interest of its department of defence in developing a vaccine with a Canadian biotech firm. The details are sketchy but indicate an overwhelming American interest in Ebola,” the journal cautioned. We are keeping our fingers crossed.