In 1986, conditions for sampling rodents for monkeypox virus in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) were rustic and home grown. The rats and mice were live-trapped by the villagers and brought to the World Health team every morning for processing.The upper photograph shows me as the record-keeper and anesthetist. I had to grossly identify the species (and prepare the museum skins of questionable animals). I placed the entire live trap in the red wooden box, added the cotton balls soaked with liquid anesthetic (chloroform or halothane) and covered the top with a clipboard that was weighted down with a car jack.
After several minutes, I would remove the unconscious rodent from the cage and pin it out, belly up on a cork board for surgery, with the animal's accession number. The two nurses behind at the "surgical" table would quickly take blood by cardiac puncture, which euthanized the animal.
Two pieces each of lung, liver, spleen, and kidney were removed by surgical technique and placed in cryogenic tubes to be frozen in liquid nitrogen. The blood was spun down in a battery operated centrifuge and the serum was also frozen. All of the samples were split between Atlanta and Moscow for analysis.
Fieldwork was exhausting and difficult. I am wearing my stern, no-nonsense expression for the camera, and the ever constant gaggle of curious onlookers. We had no hotel to retire to every night, or restaurant to have dinner. Everything that we needed, we carried with us, and we truly lived off of the fat of the land.
Photo by M. Sczeniowski, WHO
4 comments:
If anyone is interested, a company in Oregon, SIGA Technologies, has a cure for monkeypox. Groups like BARDA, the WHO, the WHA, and the FDA have given it keen attention as it is also a cure for smallpox. SIGA has recently received 80 million dollars in government grants, and registration batches of ST-246 have been produced. They await an order from a major government organization under a special EUA rule. This drug is progressing with the FDA and should soon be available for many uses as an approved pharmaceutical. Also, if you have any investment money, the stock has not moved in years (it’s at $3.60 now), and should really pop once a contract is announced.
Fascinating! Since there has been no immunization against smallpox since the early '70's, there would be a devastating outcome if weaponized smallpox was released on an unprotected population.
Resuming smallpox vaccination is not recommended due to the side-effects. However, a mass-produced drug such as ST-246 could be life-saving.
Why the continued interest in smallpox (and the related monkeypox)? Only the US and Russia are supposed to keep stocks of the smallpox virus under strict security. However, there is speculation that other nations have illicit stocks of the virus.
Briefly, reasons for concern for smallpox are 1) there is reason to believe that countries like Syria have variola (smallpox) black market from Russia, 2) it is theoretically possible to recover variola from corpses of smallpox victims previously buried in permafrost, and 3) it is possible to synthetic reconstruct the viral DNA from the sequence. Yes, there are concerns regarding mass vaccination for smallpox (although new and better inoculums are being developed). Anyway, ST-246 has been shown (in serious peer-review journals) to work against all orthopox (including monkeypox, camelpox, and smallpox).
See Antiviral Research Volume 74, Issue 3, June 2007, Page A35 Successful Treatment in the Monkeypox and Variola Primate Models of Smallpox by the Oral Drug ST-246
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2H-4N3X611-R&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=e6eaf7934233b3944a14e106cbed74be
I hope you bought some SIGA stock. SIGA Technologies is developing ST-246, which is is a demonstrated cure for monkeypox, and will be purchased by the US and NGO’s as an antibiowarfare defense against smallpox. But, it DOES work against Monkeypox. It’s not too late to buy stock. It is still a good time to get in. Delphi, even the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Frederick, MD has published it cures monkeypox-- since my last post! http://aac.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/AAC.01596-08v1
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