March 13, 2003
Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, Guangzhou, China
1,149 Infected, 128 Dead
GUAN YI HAD PROBABLY SPENT MORE OF HIS ADULT LIFE WALKING around Chinese poultry farms, wet markets, and wild animal stalls than any other virologist on earth. He knew the stench and filth too well, and during his research in animal influenzas, he liked to sometimes imagine himself as a virus. It was a trope he used in his talks, especially with mainland counterparts. He often explained interspecies transmission by describing himself as a virus.
“If I mutate, if I become bigger, say, or have different needs,” Guan Yi would say, “maybe I become too big for my apartment. Then I need to leave and go find another place to live. A virus is the same way. It mutates, one virus particle out of a billion has suddenly mutated and is no longer suited to its environment, so it leaves; it looks for a new home. Of course, most of the time, it can’t find a suitable environment, and it dies. But occasionally, very infrequently, it can find a new home, another animal in which it is comfortable.”
Guan Yi would then look around, as if he were a virus settling into a new host species. “Oh, I like it here in my new house. I can take over this cell. I can reproduce. I’m a happy mutated virus.”
He saw in these wild animal markets thousands of potential new homes for any of the thousands of viruses stacked atop one another in these cages of distressed animals waiting to be slaughtered. The animals shed billions of virus particles in their feces, blood, urine, and tears, any one of which could be a lucky mutation that might find a new host in which to thrive.
Guan Yi often warned his Chinese counterparts that since interspecies virus hopping was inevitable, they had to try to minimize the likelihood. The animal markets, however, did just the opposite. They maximized the possibility that a virus could jump species.
“Say I am a virus,” Guan Yi would explain to a bewildered Department of Forestry official. “I look around the market and I see so many possible homes.”
At the beginning of the outbreak, when Guan Yi was smuggling his samples back from China, the University of Hong Kong pathology staff had sat in the basement conference room of the Department of Clinical Pathology. Written on the whiteboard was:
Disease
Microbe
Vector
Amplifier
To Guan Yi, those remained the four central issues. Malaria, as an example, would be the disease. The malaria microbe was a type of plasmodium protozoan. The vector was the mosquito, and the amplifier would be the marsh or standing water in which mosquitoes might breed.
So far, when it came to SARS, none of these issues had yet been cleared up.
Guan Yi was working closely with Zhong Nanshan, helping the latter to set up a virology lab in the institute. In the evening, he would take the train back to Hong Kong or crash in the White Swan Hotel. On those mornings, he marveled at how empty the breakfast buffet had become. Usually, the riverfront coffee shop of this hotel was filled with American mothers and fathers having their first meals with their newly adopted Chinese children. Guangzhou often functions as a way station for American families as they acquire U.S. passports for their newest family members. It can be a bewildering sight at first, families whose ethnic composition perfectly splits into Caucasian parents and Asian children. I once asked a Chinese friend of mine what she thought of this.
“It looks like we are selling babies,” she said.
The disease outbreak in Guangdong had severely curtailed the adoption business, and as families were reluctant to come to China, the U.S. consulate was evacuating nonessential staff. Now, Guan Yi dined in private, watching the tugs and barges chug their way up the Pearl River.
He was out of touch with his colleagues in Hong Kong and would not even know about the Global Laboratory Network established by Klaus Stöhr until three days after his colleagues. No Chinese labs had been invited to join at the first stages. And Guan Yi had been spending more time in China than in Hong Kong since the outbreak had begun.
What is it?
Where does it come from?
What does it do?
How do you kill it?
He believed that the answer to those questions was somehow in those animal markets.
I am a virus, he said to himself as he sipped his breakfast congee. Where do I live?