Nancy Jaax

Nancy Jaax is an Army veterinarian and pathologist whose work brings her into direct contact with lethal viruses and the animals used to study them. Her career in high-containment laboratories is marked by a near exposure to Ebola, a demanding role in the investigation of the Reston outbreak, and a recurring conflict between her commitment to animal care and the medical purpose of research that may help save human lives.

Identity and Early Work

Nearly four years after Charles Monet’s death, Jaax is introduced in Thurmont, Maryland, as a major in the United States Army and a mother preparing dinner for her children. The next morning she rises at four, dresses in uniform, and studies in the cupola of her house. She is training in veterinary pathology and preparing for board examinations, but her specialty is taking shape around the effects of Biosafety Level 4 agents. That work may require a protective suit and places her at the boundary between ordinary veterinary practice and the study of highly dangerous pathogens.

Her professional interests are paired with a longstanding attachment to animals. She grew up on a farm, where her father raised livestock, and as a child she grieved when her prize steer was taken to be butchered. Her veterinary oath, as she understands it, binds her both to animal care and to medical work that could protect human life. Those commitments do not always point in the same direction. Jaax can accept the purpose of an experiment and still feel its cost to the animal before her.

Volunteering for Ebola Work

When Gene Johnson’s Ebola project needed a pathologist, Jaax volunteered. She was qualified for Level 4 work and did not need vaccination, and she was eager to continue working with lethal viruses and establish herself in the specialty. Her willingness did not end the debate over whether she should be allowed into the laboratory. Some colleagues doubted that a married woman could remain composed in a protective suit and treated her hands, which they considered nervous or clumsy, as a safety concern. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Johnson, her immediate superior, had to decide whether to approve her for the work.

Preparing to enter the Ebola suite meant setting aside the signs of her life outside it. Before going in, she removed her diamond engagement ring and wedding band and locked them in her desk. She changed in the small locker room, taking off her clothes and putting on a sterile surgical scrub suit. On one occasion, she left a Band-Aid on her hand as she began the procedure. The ritual of changing was not merely a uniform change: it was part of a controlled transition into a space where small failures in equipment or technique could carry serious consequences.

The Protective-Suit Breach

During the Ebola work, Jaax discovered a rip in the outer glove on her right hand after handling a monkey. Blood had spread over the main glove and sleeve of her suit. She rinsed the glove and arm in disinfectant, then noticed that her hand felt cold and wet. On inspection, she found a crack at the wrist of the suit glove and feared that infected blood might have reached the area near a cut on her palm.

The accident report concluded that she had not been exposed. Her final glove remained intact, and the working assumption was that Ebola spread through direct contact with blood and bodily fluids. The damaged suit had brought the danger close, but the last barrier held. The episode connected Jaax’s own work to an earlier chain of infection: the monkey had caught the virus from a young woman named Mayinga, who had caught it from a nun in Zaire. Jaax drove home without contracting Ebola, but the incident showed how a containment failure could nearly link a laboratory worker to an outbreak that had begun years earlier and far away.

From Reassignment to the Reston Investigation

The Army struggled with how to assign Jaax and her husband, Jerry Jaax, who held the same rank in a small veterinary corps. They were sent to the Institute of Chemical Defense near Aberdeen, Maryland. There Jaax studied the effects of nerve gas on rat brains, a safer assignment than work with hot biological agents. The couple moved from their Victorian house in Thurmont to a tract house, where they kept fish in tanks as a hobby.

In the summer of 1989, the Army appointed Jaax to a position in hot biological work, while Jerry became head of the veterinary division at the Institute. They moved back to Thurmont that August, this time to a contemporary Cape house with land for their dogs and children. Jaax returned to working in protective suits; Jerry remained uneasy about the danger but had learned to live with her work.

When sick monkeys at Reston raised concern about Ebola, Colonel David Huxsoll and C. J. Peters brought Jaax into the response because she could recognize the disease’s signs in monkeys. She travelled from Fort Detrick to Virginia with Peters and Gene Johnson. The officers wore uniforms but used civilian cars to avoid attracting attention. At the Hazleton laboratory, a pathologist had prepared slides from the livers of monkeys that had died. Jaax examined them under a microscope, looking at tissue altered by disease. Her role depended on close observation: the outbreak first had to become legible in the animal evidence.

At the monkey facility, Jaax entered the building with Captain Steven Denny carrying boxes of syringes. She noticed mucus on some monkeys’ noses, a sign that made the illness seem familiar even as the suspected threat was not an ordinary cold. Dan Dalgard selected four of the sickest monkeys for sacrifice and administered the injections. Jaax’s task was part of a larger response, not a solitary intervention: the veterinarian, pathologists, facility staff, and military team each handled a different stage of identifying and containing the outbreak.

Back at the Institute, she worked with Ron Trotter examining monkey carcasses. The disease signs were by then unmistakable to her, including severe intestinal lesions. The examinations helped determine how the virus was affecting the animals and where it might be spreading. Monkeys arrived from Reston in shipments; most carcasses were placed in triple biohazard bags, decontaminated, and sent for high-temperature incineration, while selected animals were examined. Jaax’s pathology work thus joined diagnosis to disposal: understanding the outbreak and preventing further exposure were parts of the same operation.

Work, Care, and Loss

While the Reston work was underway, Jaax received a call from her brother at a Wichita hospital. Their father was dying in cardiac failure, and the family had been asked whether to pursue extreme lifesaving measures. Jaax decided against them, knowing that her father was frail and suffering. She considered travelling home but chose not to leave her work, believing she might not be able to return in time to make a difference at the Institute. Jerry urged her to go; she refused.

Her father died while Jaax was working in the hot suite. She travelled to Kansas and reached the family burial plot in Wichita as the funeral service began. At the graveside, the flag draped over her father’s casket revealed his veteran status and broke through the composure she had maintained at work. The episode gives her professional discipline a personal counterweight: the same capacity to continue under pressure that sustains her in the laboratory also demands that she postpone a final farewell.

In a later spring interview, by then a full colonel, Jaax showed the visitor glass slides from her files and brought them to a microscope with two sets of eyepieces. A baby parrot slept nearby; when it woke, she fed it with a turkey baster. The scene gathers two sides of her practice into one room: careful attention to a living animal and continued study of the virus through preserved tissue. In the book’s larger account, viruses are often figured as predators that remain unseen until their attack becomes visible. Jaax’s work answers that invisibility not with certainty or heroism, but with disciplined looking—first at the tissue, then at the limits of the protective barriers, and finally at the human and animal costs of learning what the disease can do.