Behring Works was a vaccine factory in Marburg, Germany, whose use of imported African green monkeys for vaccine production placed it at the center of the 1967 Marburg virus outbreak. The factory’s history links animal research and international trade to the emergence of infection in people, although the precise route by which the virus first crossed into the human population is not established in the account.

Setting and purpose

Marburg is described as an old city in central Germany, surrounded by forests and meadows, with factories set in green valleys. Behring Works produced vaccines using kidney cells from African green monkeys. Its name later became attached to the virus first identified in connection with the outbreak there, following the convention of naming viruses for the places where they are discovered.

Monkey shipments and the outbreak

Behring Works regularly imported monkeys from Uganda. In 1967, shipments totaling roughly five or six hundred animals arrived by air; as few as two or three may have been incubating the virus without appearing visibly ill. After the monkeys reached the factory, the infection spread among them, and some became sick and died. The sequence made the factory a point where an infection carried in imported animals could reach people working with them.

Klaus F., an employee who fed the monkeys and washed their cages, was the first person known to be infected. He became ill on August 8, 1967, and died about two weeks later. The surviving records also trace other exposures at the factory. Monkey keeper Heinrich P. returned from vacation on August 13 and killed monkeys from August 14 through 23; his first symptoms appeared on August 21. On August 28, laboratory assistant Renate L. broke a test tube that had contained infected material, and she fell ill on September 4. These episodes show infection appearing among people whose work brought them into contact with animals or contaminated laboratory material.

Consequences and historical significance

Thirty-one people eventually contracted the virus during the outbreak, and seven died. The account presents Behring Works as the site where the outbreak’s animal and human phases met: imported monkeys were used in vaccine production, infection spread among the animals, and the virus emerged in the surrounding human workforce. It does not establish which individual monkey infected Klaus F. or specify every step of transmission, so the factory’s role is clear while the exact chain remains incomplete.

The factory’s history also returned to view during the later care of Shem Musoke in Nairobi. After learning that Musoke had tested positive for Marburg virus, David Silverstein consulted a medical textbook and encountered the brief account of the 1967 outbreak at Behring Works. The remembered factory thus connected a later clinical case to an earlier outbreak and to a broader pattern of viruses crossing from animal populations into human settings.