MEDICINE: The Killers All Around

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The advent of AIDS demolished that thinking. The sight of tens of thousands of young people wasting away from a virus that no one had known about and no one knew how to fight was a sobering experience -- especially when drugs proved powerless to stop the virus and efforts to develop a vaccine proved extraordinarily difficult. Faced with AIDS, and with an ever increasing number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, doctors were forced to admit that the medical profession was actually retreating in the battle against germs.

The question ceased to be, When will infectious diseases be wiped out? and became, Where will the next deadly new plague appear? Scientists are keeping a nervous watch on such lethal agents as the Marburg and Ebola viruses in Africa and the Junin, Machupo and Sabia viruses in South America. And there are uncountable threats that haven't even been named: a virus known only as "X" emerged from the rain forest in southern Sudan last year, killed thousands and disappeared. No one knows when it might arise again.

A U.S. Army lab in Frederick, Maryland, faced a terrifying situation in 1989 when imported monkeys started dying from a strain of the Ebola virus. After destroying 500 monkeys and quarantining the lab and everyone in it, officials found that this particular strain was harmless to humans. But the episode was dramatic enough to inspire an article in the New Yorker magazine -- now expanded into a soon-to-be released book called The Hot Zone -- and work on two competing movies (one of which seems to have collapsed before production).

The Ebola affair and the emergence of AIDS illustrate how modern travel and global commerce can quickly spread disease. Germs once confined to certain regions may now pick up rides to all parts of the world. For example, the cholera plague that is currently sweeping Latin America arrived in the ballast tanks of a ship that brought tainted water from Asia. And the New England Journal of Medicine has reported two cases of malaria in New Jersey that were transmitted by local mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were probably infected when they bit human malaria victims who had immigrated from Latin America or Asia. Writes author Laurie Garrett in a book to be published next month called The Coming Plague: "aids does not stand alone; it may well be just the first of the modern, large-scale epidemics of infectious disease."

The latest bulletins from the germ front come on top of a long series of horror stories. For years now people have been reading about -- and suffering from -- all sorts of new and resurgent diseases. As if AIDS were not enough to worry about, there was a rise in other sexually transmitted infections, including herpes, syphilis and gonorrhea. People heard about the victims who died in the Northwest from eating undercooked Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted with a hazardous strain of E. coli bacteria. They were told to cook their chicken thoroughly to avoid food poisoning from salmonella bacteria. And last year they saw how the rare hantavirus, once unknown in the U.S., emerged from mice to kill 30 people in as many as 20 states.