The Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was a one-story monkey-import facility in an office park in Reston, Virginia. It became the setting for the discovery of Ebola Reston virus in 1989 and for an Army operation to contain an outbreak among imported monkeys. Its history then took an unsettling turn: after the building was sterilized and returned to its operator, another outbreak appeared in the same facility less than a month after it was restocked.

Setting and Purpose

The unit occupied a clean, established office park not far from Leesburg Pike, amid the expanding business landscape of Reston, about ten miles west of Washington, D.C. The building had been constructed in the 1960s and was surrounded by mature trees. In autumn 1989, Hazleton Research Products, a division of Corning Incorporated, used it to house monkeys imported for laboratory-animal sales.

The facility formed one link in an international supply chain. About 16,000 wild monkeys were imported into the United States each year, and imported animals were required to spend a month in quarantine before being sent elsewhere. The rule was intended to limit the spread of infectious disease to other primates, including humans. The animals arriving at the Reston unit had been trapped in the rain forests of Mindanao in the Philippines, shipped to a wholesale facility near Manila, and transported through Amsterdam and New York before reaching Virginia.

On October 4, 1989, a shipment of 100 crab-eating macaques arrived. Two were already dead in their crates, a loss not unusual during transport. The monkeys were then housed individually under artificial lights and fed monkey biscuits and fruit in rooms designated A through L. The building’s ordinary purpose—to receive, hold, and distribute animals—made it a point of contact between wildlife and the research-animal trade, while the quarantine system made the facility a place where animal illness could be noticed before onward shipment.

The 1989 Outbreak

The first sustained warning came from colony manager Bill Volt. On November 1, he told consulting veterinarian Dan Dalgard that 29 monkeys from the October shipment had died, nearly one-third of the shipment. The building’s heating and air-handling system had also malfunctioned: its thermostat failed, the heaters continued running, and the air-conditioning system did not start. Volt wondered whether the heat was stressing the animals. Most deaths had occurred in Room F, which became the initial focus of Dalgard’s inspection.

Dalgard was an experienced primate veterinarian, called in when animals became ill or needed care. He inspected Room F with Volt, looking at the monkeys’ eyes and behavior for signs of sickness. A separate chain of investigation at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases eventually identified an Ebola-like agent in the outbreak. When C. J. Peters called Dalgard to report that the second agent was Ebola virus, Dalgard had not heard of Ebola. The finding transformed a local problem of animal deaths into a public-health emergency in Fairfax County, Virginia, where the facility stood among residential neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.

As the crisis escalated, employees became alarmed by the presence of suited responders, illness among staff, and the attention of television news crews. When Milton Frantig was taken to Fairfax Hospital, he was admitted to an isolation room with access restricted to medical personnel wearing protective clothing. The remaining workers left the building and locked it. About 450 monkeys remained inside, with the failed air-handling system and interior temperature above 90 degrees. Some animals appeared ill, and their missed morning feeding added to the immediate welfare problem. The shut, overheated building had become both an animal-care failure and a site of uncertain biological risk.

Transfer and Containment

Dalgard agreed to invite the Army into the facility. On November 30, after making up his mind to authorize entry, he gave permission for an operation focused on Room H, where the outbreak then appeared to be centered. Jerry Jaax assembled a team of commissioned officers, sergeants, and civilian animal-care personnel for a Level 4 biocontainment operation. The plan was to enter the room, euthanize the monkeys there, and collect tissue samples for analysis. Gene Johnson brought biohazard equipment, and the team prepared to work in protective suits.

The transfer of responsibility required more than a verbal agreement. Hazleton managers wanted the arrangement in writing and sought to have the Army accept legal responsibility for the building after taking it over. C. J. Peters rejected the proposed liability terms, prioritizing a rapid and clear decision over further negotiation. Dalgard agreed to fax a simple transfer letter. Peters carried it to General Philip Russell; they reviewed and signed it without sending it to Army lawyers, then returned it by fax. The building passed into Army hands, and Jerry Jaax’s team prepared to manage the larger operation.

Containment involved both the virus and the animals left within the building. Team leader Mark Haines told his personnel that every monkey in the operation would have to be euthanized, and emphasized careful needle handling, buddy monitoring, and the workers’ responsibilities to animals and science. Jerry Jaax also fed monkeys during an inspection, because he did not want them to suffer more than necessary before the planned operation. These actions expose the moral tension built into the site’s function: the monkeys were experimental and sentinel animals, but they were also living subjects whose welfare remained a concern even as the response treated them as a source of risk.

The final monkey was killed and bagged on December 7. One escaped animal took hours to catch; Jerry Jaax pursued it with a net until it became trapped behind a cage and could be sedated. A subsequent search found a chest freezer holding 10 or 15 frozen monkeys from Room F, along with vials of sedative. The team ordered the material decontaminated rather than retained for further sampling. In total, the operation collected 3,500 clinical samples. Later, the decontamination team scrubbed the building with bleach and sealed its doors, windows, and vents. On December 18, 39 electric frying pans heated disinfecting crystals to release formaldehyde gas, which remained inside the sealed building for three days. Tests of harmless bacterial spores placed inside indicated that the treatment had succeeded; for a time, the unit was described as a building where nothing lived.

Return and Second Outbreak

After the Army certified the building as decontaminated, it returned to Hazleton Research Products. In January 1990, the company again brought in crab-eating macaques from the same supplier near Manila, including animals trapped in Mindanao. Less than a month after restocking, monkeys in Room C began dying. Dalgard informed Peter Jahrling that the facility appeared to be affected again, and the virus was again identified as Ebola.

The response differed from the first operation. Because no human casualties had occurred during the 1989 outbreak, the Army, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Hazleton jointly decided to isolate the monkeys and let the outbreak run its course rather than send the Army back in protective suits. The unit thereby became, in effect, a confined observation setting for the virus in a monkey population. The outbreak spread from room to room, and by January 24 it had reached Room B. The account describes a severe respiratory illness in the monkeys, with the virus apparently moving through the building’s air-handling ducts; in rooms where an animal showed a nosebleed, about 80 percent of the animals subsequently died.

The second outbreak changed the meaning of the earlier cleanup. The first operation had removed the affected animals and subjected the building to an intensive disinfection, but the virus appeared again after the facility resumed receiving monkeys from the same source. The unit thus links quarantine, international animal trade, building systems, and emergency response in a single place. The narrative does not establish the virus’s natural reservoir or the precise route by which it entered the shipments. It does show that a building designed to hold imported animals could become a concentrated setting for detecting, containing, and observing an emerging infection—and that sterilizing the site did not end the sequence.