The hun.net virus

Measles, first described in the ninth century, is thought to have come from cattle. HIV most likely leapt into our world via monkeys and apes in the 20th century. By one estimate, there are more than , viruses in the animal world that have the potential to infect humans. We encourage these spillovers whenever we cut roads through the wilderness, clear forests to grow crops, catch wildlife to sell as trophies or butcher for food, or pen chickens and swine in places where bats and wild birds can mingle with them.

One spillover that caused international alarm at the time was the H5N1 avian influenza. It jumped to humans from poultry sold alive in Hong Kong markets in , infecting 18 people and killing six. Hong Kong squelched the outbreak by killing every one of the 1. But in , a new strain of the H5N1 virus spread outward from Southeast Asia. By the end of , it had sickened people as far west as Romania, killing more than half of them, and prompted the slaughter of millions of birds.

The global spread of bird flu—and the agricultural destruction it wrought—made a deep impression on a federal infectious-disease specialist named Dennis Carroll.

Carroll worked at the U. Until that point, most of his work on outbreaks—malaria, tuberculosis, river blindness—had involved teaming up with national ministries of health. The H5N1 flu made him see what such partnerships missed. Carroll started working with animal-health experts across the developing world, who taught farmers and live-animal sellers how to reduce exposures and risks.

The effort did what the agency had hoped: It suppressed the spread of the H5N1 bird flu, forcing it back from more than 50 countries into just a few.

The virus inhabits wild waterfowl, which pass it to domesticated and wild birds as they migrate across the world. This made Carroll wonder: What if someone had pinpointed which groups of wild birds carried the virus? Could farmers along those migratory routes have been persuaded to alter their methods—for instance, raising their chickens in closed sheds?

More broadly, could detecting pathogens before they spilled over from the wild help humans prevent the next pandemic? The five organizations had all been working at the intersection of animal science, conservation and human health.

Now everyone knows that. Finding viruses in the wild is hot, messy, risky work. Then they go out into the field to collect samples, without confining or killing the animals. They spent muggy nights trooping through jungles in personal protective gear: Tyvek suits and footwear covers, gloves and masks and aprons, head lamps and face shields. Other times they caught bats in mist nets—long, loose nets of ultra-fine filaments that they had strung between poles before the sun went down. The researchers disentangled the bats, took blood samples from their veins, swabbed their mouths and rectums—being careful not to get bitten—and then let the animals go, unharmed.

In the fall of , the Predict team in Kinshasa heard back from international colleagues and knew that a summertime mystery had been solved. Over the previous several months, four bonobos from the nearby Lola Bonobo Sanctuary had died under mysterious circumstances, raising fears of an epidemic among the apes that could spill over into the sprawling Kinshasa megalopolis. The results pointed to encephalomyocarditis virus, which preys on the heart and kills quickly.

Ever since this episode, the Predict team has been working with Andre and her staff to keep an eye out for suspicious viruses among the bonobos. Lola functions as a halfway house for infant bonobos rescued from the illegal wildlife trade. They romp around large enclosures during the day and spend their nights indoors. If all goes well, they are reintroduced to their native habitat in central DRC. The sanctuary occupies 75 acres of forest on what used to be the outskirts of the capital, nestled beneath a ring of cliffs.

Now, Andre feels besieged. This ecological mash-up is another situation that scientists recognize for spillover potential. It brings insect vectors, antibiotic-treated livestock, semi-wild animals from many different forests, and a diverse, transient group of people together, generating a potent brew of genes, mixed among species.

This makes the refuge a useful bellwether for Predict, and a petri dish microcosm of the region. As a student in Soviet Bratislava, Makuwa says she was fascinated by the electron microscope, a massive instrument that revealed startling insights through images: stringy cell membranes and steampunk viral injection systems. I was the only girl allowed to work there. Actually seeing the miniscule entities that can so swiftly dispatch animals billions of times their size was a revelation.

They moved to Kinshasa in and she was charmed by the vibrancy of the city. But if Kinshasa has become less charmingly urban, Makuwa remains entranced by the nanoscale world of viruses, scanning the scientific literature each morning for relevant studies and new data.

For example, the diminutive Ebola virus has just seven genes, and yet is quickly able to dispatch a human host, 19,genes strong. These migrants frequently bring illnesses with them from the bush, making Kingasani a hot zone worth watching, as potential zoonoses from tens of thousands of square miles are concentrated in the slum. The Kingasani Hospital is sequestered from the putrid, pitted roads by a foot tall concrete wall.

Hypothetically, this is the kind of place where a guano collector like Yalungana, from a tiny village like Wene, might end up if he scraped his leg in the bat cave and developed a persistent cough or an untreatable fever. He could spread this illness to other patients, who may be discharged before symptoms develop. As the number of victims accelerated, health officials would be scrambling to figure out what the precise infective agent was, where it came from, how it was transmitted from person to person, and how best to sever the chain.

The time needed for such assessment means that critical days would be lost in heading off a fast-spreading epidemic. The Predict team hopes that their information will give outbreak responders a valuable head start in such a case. Once detected, the unknown virus can be quickly sequenced and cross-referenced with the database that Mulembakani and his colleagues around the world have been building.

At Kingasani Hospital, he is looking to cast an even wider net by sampling human patients for viruses a process that has been approved by both the local and U.

Institutional Review Board, which assesses any experiments on humans for both efficacy and ethics. In the hazy twilight, over a dark bottle of beer, Mulembakani decompresses at an outdoor cafe, shifting from exuberant salesman to slightly depressed realist. Over the last seven years, his team has sampled thousands of animals at hundreds of sites, across some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. In the DRC, where urgent and tangible problems pervade life on a daily basis, this level of abstraction can be hard to accept.

More resources should be directed to daily demands of security, food supply, and economic growth, critics might argue, rather than a quixotic quest to catalog microscopic organisms. To Mulembakani, however, pandemics are nearly unmatched in their ability to destabilize society, and preparation is the key to prevention.

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