1989 emergency response to the Reston outbreak

The 1989 emergency response to the Reston outbreak turned an alarming laboratory result into a coordinated, contested effort to contain a dangerous agent in a Virginia monkey house. Its defining challenge was not simply to identify the virus: officials had to act while its identity and human risk remained uncertain, and while the Army’s operational capacity and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public-health authority belonged to different institutions.

Confirmation and Escalation

The crisis sharpened when Peter Jahrling’s tests on monkey samples returned results associated with Ebola Zaire twice. To communicate them outside the hot laboratory, he placed the results on waterproof paper and sent it through a chemical-disinfection tank to C. J. Peters. The procedure carried information across the boundary of the laboratory without carrying the paper untreated. Peters examined the results and urged Jahrling to leave the hot zone so they could take the matter to their commander. The sequence joined scientific verification to a practical act of escalation: evidence had to be made safe to handle before it could move up the chain of command.

At a meeting with Colonel David Huxsoll, Jahrling and Peters reported that they believed a filovirus had been found in monkeys outside Washington. Huxsoll contacted Major General Philip K. Russell, who summoned them to Fort Detrick and called Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, chief of pathology, to join the discussion. Photographs made by Tom Geisbert showed a threadlike virus; the laboratory tests pointed toward Ebola Zaire. But the test established a close relationship to that strain, not definitive identity. The possibility remained that the agent was a different, previously unknown virus. The distinction mattered: the officials were not dealing with certainty, but neither could they treat uncertainty as reassurance.

The meeting also brought the threat of airborne infection into view. Nancy Jaax described earlier monkey work: two healthy monkeys had died after the 1983 laboratory exposure incident, and, in a 1986 experiment, monkeys exposed to airborne Ebola or Marburg had died, with one exception involving Marburg. Those findings suggested that the virus could infect through the lungs and that a relatively small number of particles might be lethal. Yet the work had not been published. Jaax offered evidence with serious implications while also facing questions about why it had not appeared in the scientific literature. In the same discussion, the group had to consider that the Reston agent might not be Ebola Zaire at all, and that its behavior in people could not yet be predicted.

Choosing a Response, Dividing Authority

With no Ebola vaccine or drug treatment available, Peters framed the practical choices as biocontainment. One option was to isolate the monkey colony and let the outbreak run its course while watching people who had handled the animals; the other was to enter the building, euthanize the monkeys, and disinfect the facility. Jaax emphasized both the danger to people and the suffering the animals might undergo if left to die. She wanted to inspect them and examine tissue for characteristic inclusion bodies, which could strengthen the diagnosis. The choice therefore involved several linked questions: whether containment was possible in the existing building, how quickly intervention was needed, and how to reduce animal suffering while protecting people.

The Army’s involvement raised a separate problem of jurisdiction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had the federal mandate to control human disease; the Army had personnel and expertise for a major biohazard operation but no equivalent statutory responsibility for an outbreak on American soil. Russell recognized that capability and authority did not coincide, and that the agencies might contest control. He argued for rapid action rather than waiting for lawyers to settle every doubt, while also insisting that the response needed a plan, a leader, funding, and communication with the relevant authorities. He designated Peters as team leader and directed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention be informed rather than surprised by an Army operation.

The notification effort reached federal, state, and local institutions. Russell’s team contacted Frederick A. Murphy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Virginia Department of Health, Fairfax County, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency; an assistant secretary of defense was also to be notified. Russell first sought confirmation from the scientists in the room that the evidence indicated a filovirus. When Murphy was unavailable at his office, Russell reached him at home. Murphy took the report seriously and planned to travel to Fort Detrick the next morning to review the photographs and evidence.

Peters and Peter Jahrling also reached Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian responsible for the monkey facility. Dalgard had not heard of Ebola and initially found the news less alarming than Marburg. Peters explained that Ebola had caused outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan and described a reported case-fatality range of 50 to 90 percent. Dalgard then understood that the agent might be more dangerous than the disease he had feared. He asked Peters to wait until 7 p.m. so he could inform corporate headquarters, even though Russell had already begun notifying federal authorities. Dalgard was wary of allowing the Army into the facility: he had sent samples for diagnosis and now feared losing control of what followed. He agreed to discuss a visit the next morning, and Peters arranged for Jaax to accompany him to examine monkey tissue.

Compromise and Mission Planning

At the subsequent Fort Detrick meeting, the disagreement between the Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention became explicit. McCormick, who had treated Ebola patients in Africa and had not become ill, judged the virus difficult to catch and argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should receive the samples. He said a rapid probe test could give results in twelve hours, compared with the week Peters said might be needed. Peters doubted the claim and objected to field-testing a new technique during an outbreak. The Army already had monkey tissue and was growing the agent in culture, giving it an immediate practical advantage in examining the source of the outbreak.

Russell and Murphy reached a compromise: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would direct the human-health response and care of any human patients; the Army would handle the monkeys and their building. This division did not erase the disagreement, but it gave each institution a defined task. It also reflected the structure of the emergency: people exposed to the monkeys and the animals themselves could not be managed as though they presented the same operational problem.

With the division agreed, Peters selected Colonel Jerry Jaax to lead the field mission. Jaax headed the veterinary division and understood monkeys, although he had never worn a space suit. He and Gene Johnson began planning an operation in Level 4 conditions. Their initial plan was to clear one room of monkeys and use the results to assess how the outbreak was spreading. They established two priorities: protect the human population first, and euthanize the animals with as little suffering as possible. Jaax assembled soldiers and civilian staff, including officers, sergeants, and animal caretaker Merhl Gibson. The team was told that it would enter one room, euthanize the monkeys there, and return tissue to the Institute for analysis. The proposed departure time was 0500 the next morning, leaving less than a day to prepare.

Dalgard’s permission was essential, and it followed his own assessment of the deteriorating situation. On November 30, he authorized the Army to enter Room H, where the outbreak appeared to be centered. Johnson went ahead to reconnoiter the building and determine how to insert the team without crossing the occupied front areas. The monkey rooms were no longer being cleaned by facility workers who feared entering them. Johnson found an empty adjoining office area and used it to reach a storeroom and a corridor behind the monkey house. He mapped the storeroom as a staging area and the corridor as a possible air lock. He also had the door to the back rooms taped shut to limit the movement of contaminated air toward the front offices. The arrangement created a first barrier, though Johnson did not know that another route into the back rooms remained possible.

Transfer and Containment Work

The human-health and animal-control tracks proceeded alongside one another. At the Hazleton Washington offices, Jaax and Peters met with Dalgard and employees who had handled blood and tissue from sick monkeys. McCormick attended as the official responsible for the human-health side. The employees were frightened by reports on the radio that grossly exaggerated the number of people killed in African outbreaks, illustrating how uncertain information could intensify the emergency beyond the laboratory and monkey house.

As the response developed, the question of responsibility became more than an abstract jurisdictional issue. Dalgard’s company wanted its oral agreement with the Army put in writing and sought to have the Army accept liability for the building. Peters rejected that condition. Russell and Peters reviewed a short transfer letter without sending it to Army lawyers; they signed it and faxed it back to Dalgard. The monkey house thereby passed into Army control, clearing the way for a larger operation led by Jerry Jaax. The transfer settled who would direct the work, but it also made the assignment of responsibility consequential: Peters had been cautious about accepting language that could expose the Army to lawsuits if people were harmed.

The operation was designed to approach the building without drawing public attention. The convoy from Fort Detrick included ordinary cars and unmarked military vehicles, among them a containment ambulance equipped with a bubble stretcher and a refrigerated supply van for dead monkeys and blood samples. At the facility, the vehicles were parked behind the building. A playground and day-care center lay just beyond the nearby hillside, making the location’s proximity to ordinary community life impossible to ignore. The team entered through a rear door into the staging room, where faint monkey calls could be heard beyond a wall. Jerry Jaax and Mark Haines prepared to be the first inside; support personnel helped them into pressurized Racal suits.

The response ultimately included a thorough decontamination of the building. On December 18, the decontamination team scrubbed the interior with bleach, sealed doors, windows, and vents, and placed spore samples of a harmless bacterium at points inside as indicators of the gas treatment’s effectiveness. Thirty-nine electric frying pans were used to heat disinfectant crystals and release formaldehyde gas into the sealed facility. The gas remained inside for three days and penetrated the air ducts, offices, furniture, equipment, and floor drains. When the team returned in suits, the indicator samples had been killed. The account does not treat sterilization as something that can be proved absolutely; it presents the result as strong evidence that the building had been sterilized.

The emergency response thus moved from a test result passed through a disinfection tank to a negotiated division of authority, a written transfer, and an operation planned around rooms, routes, suits, and barriers. Its central tensions remained visible throughout: a virus identified with confidence but not fully characterized, a plausible airborne danger but incomplete evidence about its transmissibility, and institutions whose authority did not match their capabilities. Containment depended not on a single decisive discovery, but on coordinating scientific judgment, public-health responsibility, military resources, and the physical means of keeping the agent inside the monkey house.