The Plague Fighters looks at stopping the next pandemic before it begins:
Sometime around the 1930s, epidemiologists theorize, a hunter much like Sampson walked into a forest a few hundred miles southeast of Okoroba, killed a chimpanzee carrying a then-unknown virus, and became an unwitting driver of human fate. Perhaps blood — infected with simian immuno deficiency virus — dripped down his back into an open wound as he hauled the catch home. Or perhaps he cut his hand while butchering the chimp. But somehow, his own blood came into contact with another primate’s blood, and the pathogen changed into a form well built to spread from one human to the next. The hunter then passed the virus, now known as human immuno deficiency virus-1 group M, or HIV, to a fellow villager, and it began its slow leach into the surrounding human population.
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Launched in 1999, Wolfe’s Cameroon project aims to discover viruses that, like HIV, originate in wild animals and then cross over to infect humans. Known as zoonoses, such pathogens constitute an estimated three- quarters of all emerging human diseases. The list of animal-to-human invaders includes malaria, smallpox, West Nile, Ebola, SARS, and — the threat of the moment — avian influenza. Despite these killers and the near- certainty that new devastating zoonoses will emerge, little is understood about either the range of potential pathogens in the animal kingdom or the way they enter and spread among humans.
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The early results have been promising. The Cameroon project recently discovered at least three unexpected or unknown viruses — all in the same family of RNA retroviruses as HIV — by collecting and analyzing the blood of bushmeat hunters like Sampson. The findings cemented Wolfe’s reputation in the world of viral discovery and were dramatic in their own right. But to him, what they really represent is a proof of concept.Now, using $2.5 million he received in 2004 from a National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award as seed money, he’s building a network of virus-discovery projects, using Cameroon as the prototype. By monitoring hunters and wild-game markets in a dozen hard-to-reach potential sites in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Laos, Madagascar, Para guay, and China, he plans to build a taxonomy of what’s called “viral chatter”: the regular transmission of viruses from wild animals to humans, often without any further spread among humans or consequences for the infected. It’s the epidemiological equivalent of information blips on a CIA analyst’s screen. “In the intelligence community, you have people monitoring intelligence and looking for keywords,” Wolfe says. “Every time a keyword comes up, it’s not going to signal a terrorist threat. But by studying the patterns, you can begin to understand what you might be looking for. I study some agents that are very unlikely to be pandemic. But we are asking, where did they die out? What are their features?”