09/21/2005
Missing Rodents
Last week’s column ended on a somber note on the possibility that the chimpanzee and other great apes were in danger of becoming extinct. It may have been in the September National Geographic devoted to Africa that I read that the reason so many exotic animals survived in Africa is that they have evolved together with humans, whom they learned to fear and avoid. In contrast, animals in North and South America had no contact with humans. When humans did arrive on the scene relatively recently, the animals were sitting ducks and many were hunted to extinction or near extinction. Now, humans in Africa have increased in numbers that threaten the existence of our closest relatives.
How to solve this problem? Tom Clancy’s novel “Rainbow Six” has a chilling solution. A group of environmental extremists decide to give the earth back to the animals by killing all the human beings on our planet, except for a select, small number of people that includes themselves. Their plan is to spread a new and deadly form of Ebola virus for which they have developed the only vaccine, ensuring their survival. Clancy, as usual, weaves a complicated web of horror and intrigue. His fictitious bioterror scenario may be extreme but, living in an area deeply affected by 9/11 and in the state from which were mailed anthrax-laced letters following 9/11, Clancy’s novel does grab one’s attention.
The very day I finished the novel, the September 15 Star- Ledger’s headline was “Lab loses track of three mice that had plague”! I thought, “Hey, it might not take bad guys to do us in, just carelessness.” The mice are missing from a bioterror research lab dedicated to finding new vaccines for the plague, considered one of the possible agents that might be used by terrorists. The lab, run by the Public Health Research Institute, is located on the Newark campus of UMDNJ, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. (I’m an adjunct associate professor at another UMDNJ campus.)
The Ledger article, by Josh Margolin and Ted Sherman, says the FBI has a number of agents on the case and has said that it is as satisfied as it can be that the public safety is not at risk. The New Jersey State Health Commissioner said that mice with the plague die “very fast” and that the “risk to the public … is slim to none.” I’m assuming they’re correct but, living fairly close to Newark, I’ll give any mice I see a wide berth. Actually, I should also be concerned about fleas. The article mentioned the case a number of years ago of a New Yorker who contracted bubonic plague, probably from infected fleas, while visiting New Mexico. That poor fellow ended up having his legs amputated.
The details of the experiment involving the lost mice are rather bizarre. The experimenters started out with three sets of 8 mice in three separate cages. All three sets of mice were inoculated with a bacterium that causes bubonic and other types of plague. The 8 mice in one cage were given no vaccine, the 8 mice in the second cage were given a vaccine known to be effective against the plague and the 8 mice in the third cage were given a vaccine being tested. This latter test vaccine was obviously not very effective since, only three days later, all the mice in that cage were dead, as were all the mice in the group that received no vaccine. On the other hand, all the mice in the third cage were still alive. The dead mice were bagged and placed in a freezer.
Four days later, someone looked in the last cage and only found 7 mice! I’m assuming they were alive, although this was not mentioned in The Ledger article. The workers then retrieved the bagged bodies from the freezer and found only 7 mice in each bag! Unbelievable! I was relieved to read that the animal handler responsible for not noticing the discrepancies is not working in the facility at this time. The current thinking or hope is that their fellow cage mates ate the three missing mice. Unfortunately, the handler cleaned up and incinerated the contents of the cages without checking for any mouse remains.
No wonder the FBI was called in. It seems unlikely that each of the three groups of mice would decide to eat just one of their fellow inmates. It also seems to me unlikely that, if the mice escaped, only one from each cage would find its way out. Given the sloppy handling of the experiment, could it be that whoever assembled the groups in the first place just didn’t count out 8 mice correctly three different times? Or did someone deliberately let the mice out of the cages or take them with him or her? It’s hard to conceive why anyone would do that with all three sets of mice, or even any of the mice. I should think that a terrorist would find access to better sources of plague material.
On reflection, there may be a somewhat feasible scenario for the eating of just one mouse per cage. If the mice tend to eat dead fellow mice, then it’s possible that the first mouse to die would get eaten and that, in the two cages where all were found dead, the rest of the mice either died shortly thereafter or became too weak to eat before dying. In the third cage, perhaps one mouse died and the others, in which the vaccine was effective, stayed healthy and not prone to be eaten. That’s the best scenario I can come up with for three eaten mice.
The term “bubonic” derives from the prime symptom of the plague, swollen lymph glands known as “bubos”. According to my 1962 World Book Encyclopedia, the bubos are most likely to appear in the groin, armpits and neck. Fever, chills, headache, body pains and extreme exhaustion are among the other symptoms. Today, prompt treatment with antibiotics will stop the disease. This was not the case back in the 1600s, when over 150,000 people died in London alone. In India, over ten million people died from the plague in 20 years around the beginning of the 20th century.
Aside from villains deliberately trying to do us in or accidents in a bioterror lab inadvertently spreading a killer disease, Nature continues developing its own forms of bioterror. Of most current concern is the possibility of a pandemic resulting from the spread of bird flu from Asia around the world. This possible pandemic has been the subjects of a flood of articles in the media and in scientific journals. The so-called H5N1 virus is the bad guy, or at least the one that has garnered the most attention. H5N1 has either killed or been responsible for the deliberate slaughtering of tens of millions of chickens. How many other birds and animals it has killed is unknown, but at least 50 people have succumbed to H5N1. So far, it seems that the humans have been infected through contact with infected poultry or other birds but there is the possibility that H5N1 has evolved or will evolve to be transmitted from human to human and that’s when we’re all in trouble.
All this sounds pretty scary. Let’s hope our researchers have the vaccine or other remedy in hand if H5N1 does decide to jump from human to human. Those missing mice don’t seem nearly as frightening now.
Allen F. Bortrum
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