The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

Charles Monet is the pseudonym Preston assigns to the man who contracts Marburg virus in Kitum Cave and dies in a Nairobi hospital in 1980. Monet had only arrived in Kenya in the summer of 1979. The French citizen is described as a “loner” and nature lover whose closest relationships were with impoverished local sex workers: “He gave money to his women friends, and they, in return, were happy to love him” (30).

Monet is “fifty-six years old, of medium height and build, with smooth, straight brown hair; a good-looking man” (27). His experiences in his final weeks are clearly posited as a speculative reconstruction: “it would have rained”; “Perhaps Monet stood on the grass”; and “no doubt admiring the view” (32, 35). The thinness of his characterization is no doubt partly the result of Preston’s attempts to reconstruct him more than a decade after his death by speaking to people who could have known him only for half a year, but this lack of concrete information helps to establish the air of mystery around his case and the search for the elusive natural host of the Marburg virus.

Nurse Mayinga, as Preston calls her, is Mayinga N’Seka, a nurse at the Ngaliema Hospital in Kinshasa, in what was then Zaire, who dies after treating Sister ME there in the first known Ebola outbreak, which occurred in 1976. Preston describes her as “a pleasant, quiet, beautiful young African woman” (110). Mayinga was 22 years old at the time of her death, a professional healthcare worker killed in the line of duty. Preston emphasizes her youth and the tragic shortening of her life by discussing her relationship with her parents (“she was the apple of their eye”) and her hopes of further study in Europe (110).

After exhibiting symptoms, but before returning to Ngaliema Hospital for treatment, N’Seka circulated in downtown Kinshasa for two days, exposing at least 36 direct contacts to Ebola. Preston can only speculate about her motives, suggesting that “It must have been a case of psychological denial” (110) that caused her to attempt to arrange her exit papers for Europe and then seek care at two other hospitals before returning to Ngaliema Hospital, where the seriousness of her illness was immediately recognized. N’Seka may also have sized up the capacity of the local medical infrastructure to treat Sister ME’s illness and attempted to save her own life by fleeing. N’Seka’s time in the city caused great alarm when it was reported to the international epidemiology community, but, after weeks of quarantine, none of N’Seka’s immediate contacts proved infected.

Without ever consenting to it, Mayinga gave her name to the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire as samples of her blood reached laboratories the world over. Her blood serum is also used to test unknown viruses against the known filovirus strains; this, too, is called by scientists “the Mayinga” (191). Virus particles in her blood were ultimately DNA sequenced and used to develop an Ebola vaccine. Few inadvertent contributions to science have ever been more significant (Freudenthal, Emmanuel. “A Short History of an Ebola Vaccine.” The New Humanitarian, 4 Jun. 2019).