Rabid

by Monica Murphy

  More than a decade later, however, when Rödlach conducted wide-ranging interviews with Zimbabweans about the origins of AIDS, this dog story still came up frequently. Those who cited it usually did not believe that the infection had been in any way accidental. Instead, the white man had invented HIV, infected the dog with it, and then specifically recruited the black women in order to pass the disease on to them. Folk narratives of disease in Africa often blame some sort of “sorcery,” and in this case it was a sorcery with a particularly twenty-first-century narrative, involving as it did an evil, virus-inventing scientist and an international pornography market. (In some African countries, the white man in the narrative has become a “European development expert.”) And yet the core of the story is primal as well as universal, traded from Africa to Belize to Scotland to Newfoundland to the United States. Even in an era when science can illuminate the mysteries of disease at the finest molecular scale, we retain a deep-seated sense that an unnaturally virulent disease must have its origins in the most unnatural of couplings: the commingling of the human and the animal.

  On May 6, 1994, when the Channel Tunnel began carrying rail traffic between the United Kingdom and France, the proximate terror in the minds of the British people was not about economic collapse or invading armies or even marauding tourists. It was about rabies. The disease had been eradicated entirely from Britain in 1902, and notwithstanding a few animal scares over the years, usually involving dogs brought in from mainland Europe, rabies had never again found a foothold on British soil. Just before the tunnel opened, one poll found that two-fifths of those who objected to the tunnel did so because it would make it “easy to bring rabies into the country”; in an earlier survey, carried out by a local paper in Folkestone, Kent, just near the tunnel’s mouth, some 88 percent of respondents believed the Chunnel would render rabies “virtually unstoppable” or at least greatly increase its incidence. It is difficult to overstate just how large rabies loomed in the minds of the Kentish in particular. When interviewed by the Australian academic Eve Darian-Smith, an Anglican clergyman in Kent put it in the starkest possible terms. “The Channel Tunnel is a violation of our island integrity—a rape,” he said. “Building it was a triumph of power and money over ordinary people and the English countryside. People think it might give us rabies in the same way as a rape victim might catch AIDS.”

  As not a few commentators suggested during the Chunnel dustup, the eradication of rabies at the century’s beginning seemed if anything to have increased British terror of the disease in the subsequent decades. Rabies came to stand in for all manner of foreign ills; “the blessing of insularity,” one member of Parliament remarked in 1990, “has long protected us against rabid dogs and dictators alike.” And it did not help matters that an unscrupulous press had often preyed upon rabies fears in canny ways. This was particularly true during the mid-1970s, when a nasty outbreak of fox rabies in France made headlines across Britain. In the midst of the scare, Larry Lamb, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the Sun, bought for serialization a work of fiction called Rabid, which he retitled Day of the Mad Dogs. He had the first installment illustrated with the head of a rabid dog, foam running from its enormous jaws right down the page of the paper.

  More shocking still, the paper produced a television commercial to promote the series, hiring as its canine stars the very same dogs that had appeared in the renowned horror film The Omen. “The commercial began sedately,” Lamb later recalled. A middle-aged couple sits relaxing in the drawing room of an elegant country home. All of a sudden, the couple’s two dogs pounce on them, slavering. “We showed close-ups of the dogs’ foaming mouths”—achieved with shaving cream, Lamb said proudly—“and bloodied victims.” This touched off a montage of horrors, including screaming babies and hunters out looking for mad dogs, before ending with a scene of the “expiring victim, sweating and moaning in hospital.” The spot was so horrifying that by 11:00 p.m. on the very day it first ran, it was ordered off the air by broadcasting regulators.

  Needless to say, Day of the Mad Dogs, both in serialization and then as a stand-alone novel, was a runaway success. Its terrible chain of events is set in motion by John and Paula, a young married couple who vacation in France soon after the death of their beloved dog. While staying in a villa just outside Cassis, the pair meets a bedraggled but affectionate stray, and Paula decides that they simply must bring it home. John is initially reluctant, but as he starts to come around, he finds that Paula, disinterested in sex ever since the previous dog died, notably warms to him again (“He began to wonder when he had last felt her nipple so erect”). Paula refuses to allow the new dog, which they name Asp, to get stuck in that nasty old British pet quarantine. Six months, she points out, is equivalent to “five years or more” for Asp; apparently, British dog years outpace American ones like the pound against the dollar. So the pair recruit John’s rakish school chum Peter—with whom he once shared “a record unbroken stand for the first wicket against Lancing”—to smuggle Asp across the Channel in his yacht.

  The outcome is as expected: once ensconced in their town of Abbotsfield, Asp goes mad. Soon the bodies, canine and human, begin to pile up. At the novel’s end, with more than ten people (including Paula) dead and a good fraction of Britain’s pets exterminated wholesale, the townsfolk of Abbotsfield abduct John from his home and lock him in a dungeon with a rabid dog. Not until he is suffering through the final agonies of the disease do they haul him up from the prison, return him to his home, and set it ablaze with him inside.

  The same year Day of the Mad Dogs appeared—1977—another pulp thriller about rabies, The Rage, hit British shelves.* Patriotic themes that in the former book merely hector the reader reappear in the latter to beat him about the head. In this story, it is Emma, ten-year-old daughter of the corrupt civil servant Lambert Diggery, who sneaks back an adorable dog she meets in the Ardennes, on a vacation where British declinism hangs morosely in the air. (The lass, after asking her father about the balance-of-trade deficit, sighs with innocent wisdom: “It’s no way to run a country, is it?”) Once smuggled into Mother England, the dog bites Emma’s horse, which later rears up mad while the girl is riding it in a picturesque gymkhana. Next, the dog bites Emma herself, who, in the final throes of her own madness, will (in an echo of Tea Cake) chomp down on her own mother’s neck. Finally the dog bites two foxes, the necessary narrative device by which to infect the hounds during a classic English hunt. As if this whole tableau were not isolationist enough, we learn along the way that Lambert Diggery is so besotted with the affections of Monique, a prostitute in Brussels—yes, he serves as a representative to the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the EU—that he has been helping her sinister confederates move heroin onto British soil.

  As in Day of the Mad Dogs, the imagined outbreak of The Rage could be easily controlled, were it not for a terribly implausible series of coincidences. One intrepid reporter locates the initial dog’s corpse, but while driving to deliver the remains to his boss for testing, the young man crashes his car and is consumed, along with the evidence, in the ensuing fireball. Later the boss finds another rabid dog and locks it in his trunk, but when he is pulled over for reckless driving, the police open the trunk and allow the pooch to escape.

  However ridiculous both novels may be, they do shed light on an essential problem of island eradication. Their plots hinge on the notion that authorities in both medicine and government, so sure that rabies cannot be a problem in Britain, will turn a blind eye to clear signs that the disease has returned. (Depressingly, this problem is far from fictional, as Chapter 8—about attempts to control a rabies outbreak on Bali, a previously rabies-free island—will make clear.)

  So perhaps it is not surprising how keenly rabies figured, nearly two decades later, in the campaign against the Channel Tunnel. Opponents were little dissuaded by the argument that the length of the tunnel—some thirty-five miles long, with no source of food—would confound any four-footed migran
ts. These opponents were only partly mollified by the elaborate set of defenses that the tunnel’s architects put in place after the outcry: security fences with animal-proof mesh, twenty-four-hour animal surveillance, and electrified barriers—“stun mats” was the more colorful term invoked—inside the tunnel. Soon before the tunnel opened, its PR handlers revealed to the media that a French fox had tested the defenses; their response was delicate but made clear that the unfortunate creature had not gotten far. Still, on the Chunnel’s inauguration day in 1994, as Julian Barnes famously joked in The New Yorker, it was “as if lining up behind Mitterrand and the Queen as they cut the tricolor ribbons at Calais were packs of swivel-eyed dogs, fizzing foxes, and slavering squirrels, all waiting to jump on the first boxcar to Folkestone and sink their teeth into some Kentish flesh.”

  Fortunately, after nearly twenty years of operation, the rabies invasion of Britain has yet to materialize. The most recent rabid animal to be unwittingly imported was in 2008; it came not from France but from Sri Lanka, by air, and it was diagnosed while still in quarantine.

  Sensationalism aside, westerners no longer have much reason to fear rabies as acutely as we do. Meanwhile, though, plenty of other zoonotic diseases—and their host species—are lining up to terrify us in the twenty-first century. From the monkeys, we have monkeypox, which more than ninety Americans contracted in 2003 after a batch of prairie dogs got infected at a pet store. Chikungunya and dengue fever, two more diseases that lurk in primate populations but spread via mosquito, have been expanding their range: in 2010, dengue was even found to be circulating in Miami. From the bats, we have the formidable Hendra and Nipah viruses, which cause encephalitis that kills human cases at rates upward of 50 percent. Nipah is perhaps the scariest of all, because it has already demonstrated its ability to spread from person to person; a survey of 122 human cases in Bangladesh found that 87 died from the disease, with more than half having been caused by human-to-human transmission.

  Beyond these exotic new arrivals, of course, we have our annual bouts with the granddaddy of them all: influenza, whose yearly mutations wipe out thousands of people worldwide, with the threat of killing hundreds of times that when a particularly effective strain comes along. In 2009, it was the swine flu that snuffled back with a vengeance. Nearly three-quarters of a century after Patrick Laidlaw and Richard Shope identified the Spanish influenza as a disease of the pig, the H1N1 strain infected tens of millions of people, making it the first certified global pandemic since HIV/AIDS. The death toll was modest by pandemic standards but still significant, with more than fourteen thousand deaths confirmed and significantly more than that suspected.

  Swine flu showed the incredible and abiding psychological power of animal origins in the cultural reception of disease. Once the flu’s porcine origins had been revealed, there was little to stop the general public around the world from branding it a pig disease, despite all the caveats—no, you can’t get it from eating pork—piled on at the urging of nervous governments. The standard naming convention for years had been to identify flu strains by country of origin, à la “Spanish influenza.” But this proved to be even less tenable, politically, than the animal name: Mexican officials and commentators rose up in outrage at attempts to brand H1N1 the “Mexican flu,” whereas the pigs could find no similarly eloquent advocates. “Swine flu” stuck.

  The Muslim world took the swineness of the swine flu particularly hard. In Afghanistan, the nation’s lone pig—Khanzir (Pig), which lives in the Kabul zoo—was placed unceremoniously into quarantine. Shops in the United Arab Emirates pulled all pork products from their shelves, and imports were suspended throughout the region. Tunisia went so far as to ban its citizens from carrying out the pilgrimage to Mecca, for fear that they might return with the disease. Swine flu did occasion some levity, at least, among newspaper cartoonists in Muslim countries, who used it as another excuse to tar their longtime adversaries (and mutual distrusters of pork), the Israelis. Qatar’s Al-Watan newspaper, for example, ran a cartoon called “The Flu in Israel,” in which one point of the six-pointed Jewish star formed a pig’s head; less than a week later, it ran another sketch called “The Peace Process,” in which an Arab is depicted as a surgeon, Israel as a flu-ridden pig. The same week in the UAE, Al-Khalij’s cartoon entitled “The Racism Flu” stuck a pig nose on the face of Israel’s foreign minister. The following week, an Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Ali Osman, made this connection quite a bit more explicit when he declared that Jews were the source of all pigs and thus responsible for the outbreak.

  Egypt, in fact, was the site of the most dramatic reaction to the pandemic: the wholesale slaughter of the country’s 300,000 pigs, despite the lack (at the time of the edict) of a single documented case in either pigs or humans. These pigs were the treasured property of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority; in Cairo, a devoted population of Coptic trash collectors, called the zabaleen, had for decades employed thousands of scavenging pigs in disposing of the city’s waste. But relations between Muslims and Christians have for decades been tense, sometimes erupting into outright violence, and it was hard not to see this preemptive move by the government as an act of prejudice carried out via the law.

  A cynical view of the government’s motives seemed especially justified once the methods of the massive pig cull became known. Officials had promised that the animals would be humanely slaughtered, with throats cut, and the meat preserved; but an Egyptian newspaper, after following a truck of seized pigs, found that their treatment was nothing short of barbaric. Video footage shows workers using a front-end loader to fill an enormous dump truck with screaming, squirming pigs, piled atop one another. Then the truck deposits the pigs at a vast burial ground, where they are killed slowly—“covered with chemical products and left for thirty or forty minutes until they are dead,” one worker tells the camera—and then unceremoniously covered with quicklime. Other amateur footage showed pigs brained in the streets with metal poles, piglets stabbed to death.

  It was a scene that could have played out in the nineteenth-century streets of London or Paris, except with a different animal as victim. For all the ways that scientific advancement during the past century or so has served to beat back superstition, it’s worth reflecting that our zoonotic sleuthing in particular—our establishment, beginning with Y. pestis in 1894, that most of our myriad afflictions have an origin in animals—has been something of a Pandora’s box. For centuries, after all, we suffered through waves of flu without having to blame some different creature for each set of shivers. Today, though, every new strain will expose some species to the sort of TV coverage normally reserved (at least where animals are concerned) for shark attacks alone. Four thousand years after the Laws of Eshnunna, and more than a century after Pasteur slew rabies, acquiring a disease from animals still shocks us, and, as the pigs of Cairo discovered, it can still drive humans to hysterical violence.

  * * *

  * It’s this variety that best fits Chuck Klosterman’s puckish notion of zombies as a metaphor for our high-tech modern life: “Continue the termination. Don’t stop believing. Don’t stop deleting. Return your voice mails and nod your agreements. This is the zombies’ world, and we just live in it.”

  * Today’s scientists believe that AIDS most likely arose through the hunting of monkeys and apes for bush meat.

  * There is a curious American footnote to this peculiarly British outbreak of hysteria. For a few months in the fall of 1977, the horror writer Stephen King lived in England, during which time he penned the first draft of Cujo, America’s most famous rabies-horror yarn. King has always maintained that the inspiration for the novel came from “reading a story in the paper in Portland, Maine, where this little kid was savaged by a Saint Bernard and killed.” But it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t at least subconsciously influenced by the rabies-horror boom in Britain. He could hardly have been unaware of either book while in England, particularly because the latter book, The Rage, has an almost identical title
to a novel of his own—Rage—that he had just published under his pen name, Richard Bachman.

  Photograph of Matthew Winkler, a six-year-old boy who survived rabies in 1970. Dr. Rodney Willoughby taped this photo to the wall of Jeanna Giese’s hospital room in 2004.

  7

  THE SURVIVORS

  Dr. Rodney Willoughby, a specialist in pediatric infectious disease at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, was dubious when he heard that a possible case of rabies was being transferred to his care. “I was skeptical she had rabies,” he recalls. “Because that never happens.”

  It was October 2004. The patient was a high-school athlete, a fifteen-year-old girl who was suffering from fatigue, vomiting, vision disturbances, confusion, and loss of coordination. Willoughby considered some other brain infection or various autoimmune diseases as more likely causes for her condition. But he made sure that the samples necessary to rule out rabies were collected and sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta within hours of the girl’s arrival. In the meantime, she was put in strict isolation to protect hospital personnel from possible exposure. Her condition quickly deteriorated; she began to salivate excessively and developed an involuntary jerking in her left arm. Soon, Willoughby had to sedate her and insert a breathing tube. As hours ticked by, he began to prepare for the possibility of a positive test result.