I was working in a town called Giessen in what was then West Germany, only 30 km from the city of Marburg, which shortly after my arrival suffered an outbreak of Marburg Virus, as it was later called.
Marburg Virus was apparently a close relative of Ebola, which I somehow thought hung out mainly in Africa, where it took its name from the Ebola River in the Congo, not an ideal place to go swimming.
The sinister fact — for me — was that I had visited Marburg the previous weekend. African green monkeys were blamed for the outbreak, although I don’t recall seeing any during my brief visit, and neither to the best of my recollection did I choose the monkey gland steak in the Tiergarten Restaurant where I dined.
I remember reading about an African warlord who vaccinated his entire army of 40,000 men against Sudanese monkeys, and although they seemed unlikely military opponents, I began to treat that warlord with a new respect. A sentence I never thought I would write.
We have our own warlords nowadays, even if our war is of a different sort. In the campaign against a virus that is unimpressed by numbers like 40 thousand, and turns up its spiky nose at anything less than the most modern of weapons, our generals — or general practitioners — have rarely lost a battle. Vaccines Rule, OK?
I gather that clusters of viruses are thick as thieves, like those Weird Sisters, Marburg and Ebola. Let’s hope, as with the thickest of thieves, they end up serving their sentence out of our harm’s way, and never being released again. Perhaps, like the planet Krypton’s enemies at the start of the first Superman film, they could be whooshed off into space and warned never to return, or be sentenced to death by vaccination.
Poor old Marburg, in its own way, may have acted like a psychological inoculation (I’m offering this insight free to the medical profession) which prepared me for later encounters with SARS in Hong Kong and COVID-19. You’re welcome.
As my face gradually aged unseen behind different masks in various locations, I like to think that the passing of the years brought an advance in sagacity and worldly wisdom. I can hear incredulous laughter in the background as I type that, and I bet people also ridiculed the warlord who vaccinated his entire army. But he probably had the last laugh, not the green monkeys. Another sentence I never thought I’d write.
