On September 1, 1970, a 9-month-old boy was brought to a hospital in Basankusu, a small town in the northwest of what is now called the Congo. The baby was covered with a horrible rash--large, hard, painful pustules that radiated out toward the face and the extremities. It looked just like smallpox, a virus that had supposedly been all but eradicated from the face of the Earth.
The doctors in Basankusu took samples, which eventually ended up in the hands of renowned Soviet virologist Svetlana Marrenikova. She grew the virus and inoculated it into a rabbit skin, where it produced a lesion she'd seen before, but never on a human. This was not smallpox but monkeypox, a disease first identified in 1958, when it was found spreading among Asian and African monkeys that had been captured for laboratory research.
Four cases in Liberia soon followed, and other reports of the ...
