I just returned from the sprawling campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. This huge federal agency is on the front line of fighting just about every kind of health threat, from biological weapons to dengue fever to obesity—both in the United States and abroad. (They have 14,000 employees in countries around the world).
But more importantly (for glamour-seeking sci-fi fans), the CDC has played a starring role in just about every apocalyptic movie or book ever made, from Stephen King’s The Stand to Richard Preston’s Hot Zone. Will Smith researched his role in I Am Legend by chatting with CDC scientists. (Yes, he is as nice as he seems, CDC insiders say.)
So is working at the CDC as exciting as the movies make it out to be? Well, yes. On the day I was there for a tour, I met Pierre Rollin, MD, of the Special Pathogens Branch, who had just come from a meeting to discuss a name for a new killer virus.
The nasty bug killed four people in South Africa in September and October and possibly another in Brazil in early December. It causes a flu-like illness that rapidly escalates into respiratory failure and shock.
The folks at the CDC discovered the beastie by taking a dangerous, virus-laden tissue sample from one of the patients, growing it in a level-4 biosafety lab (think moon suits and disinfectant showers), and then magnifying it a kazillion times on an electron microscope.
They figured out that it’s a new type of arenavirus (so-called because under a high-powered scope, the germs look like grains of sand scattered in an arena). Such viruses can be spread in rodent urine and droppings, although the researchers are not yet sure of the source in this case.
And they’re equally stumped on a name for the lousy thing. Usually, researchers who identify a germ just pick a local landmark and borrow the moniker. The Ebola virus, for example, was named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the term Nipah virus comes from a village near Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. But sometimes folks don’t want to share a name with a fatal illness.
When a type of Hantavirus (after the Hantaan River in South Korea) was discovered in the southwestern United States, the Navajo tribe strongly objected to the first proposed name, the “Four Corners virus,” says Dr. Rollin. The researchers then tried the name of a local town. No-go. Their solution? They ended up calling it sin nombre virus, or “no-name virus” in Spanish.
And rumor has it that the folks who live in Lyme, Conn., aren’t crazy about having their town’s name linked to a tick-borne, arthritis-causing germ.
In the case of the new South African virus, the patient was a safari-booking agent originally from Zambia; he was transferred to South Africa for treatment (where he infected a paramedic, a nurse, and a hospital housekeeper). The researchers mulled naming the virus after a South African landmark, but wondered if that was fair since the patient was Zambian.
But fairness doesn’t always win in these cases. The Marburg virus, for example, is named after a German town—even though the source was imported African monkeys. And Ebola Reston got its name from the town in Virginia, not the imported monkeys who brought it there.
Dr. Rollin said they might skirt the issue by calling the new South African virus Lu-Jo, a combination of the names of two cities—Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa. Rhyming with Cujo, it seems to carry the right air of menace, but I hope J.Lo doesn’t object.
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