Scary Stories

Patricia Nell Warren’s Left Field

Around 1974, when I was still a Reader’s Digest editor, I helped condense John Fuller’s book about Lassa fever. By the time the issue was on press, everybody in the Book Department had the heebie-jeebies. Fuller’s masterful story of an historic 1969 epidemic had spooked us hardened media professionals. We were looking over our shoulder for viruses.

The book was Fever! The Hunt for a New Killer Virus. The Digest (which worked closely with White House policy) had sent Fuller to Nigeria to research the outbreak that first brought this disease to world attention. Natives of West Africa have developed some immunity, but for the non-immune, mortality can reach fifty percent. One day in a remote hospital, white missionary nurses were suddenly, calamitously dying. The book followed a desperately-ill survivor to a U.S. hospital. That was where the Lassa virus first swam into view in a U.S. researcher’s microscope, a spiny sphere swimming in its fluid galaxy like a tiny malevolent planet. From there it got loose in the lab and started killing Americans. To stop the epidemic, the petri dishes were hastily incinerated.

Virus stories frighten us horribly. Maybe it’s the long slow cultural conditioning—the classic books like Microbe Hunters and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. Not to mention sci-fi novels and high-tech scary movies and TV tales (like The X-Files) featuring killer viruses. Maybe it’s the tiny size of a virus, its apparent stealth and intelligence, its ability to survive and mutate, that compound the chill. Somehow viruses are far scarier than bacteria (though anthrax, which is caused by a bacteria, can be pretty scary too). John Fuller was a meticulous researcher, but he knew how to spin facts into a scary story. In fact, his next Digest project was a well-documented UFO article, “Incident at Exeter,” that later became a scary movie.

Because of their intrinsic scariness, virus stories have their political use, regardless of how solidly—or loosely—they’re based on real science. Public-health authorities learned to use them to frighten people into accepting restrictions—often with legitimate reason. A century ago, yellow fever and Spanish flu made quarantine an accepted reality in American society. When HIV appeared in the 1980s, it became the next in a train of scary new viruses—Hong Kong flu, Ebola, dengue fever, West Nile—to reach public view. The latest is bird flu, looming out of Asia with its seventy-five percent mortality rate.

But when scary stories about HIV become a favorite weapon of moralistic politics, problems can arise. In February, news media screamed that a “new super-bug” had been found in a New York City gay man who came to the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center clinic for treatment. The strain was allegedly resistant to nineteen of twenty available drugs and led to AIDS in months instead of years. Instead of publishing in a peer-reviewed venue, Aaron Diamond director David Ho and New York City’s health commissioner Thomas Frieden (who sits on the Aaron Diamond board) called a press conference.

A huge wave of heebie-jeebies swept across the country. Many in the gay community went into hysterics. Conservative pundits demanded names-based reporting, universal HIV testing, quarantine for gays.

Right away, however, other scientists raised doubts as more information appeared. Turns out the virus might not be as resistant or virulent or even as new as claimed. But, as a publicist friend of mine says, “You can’t unbang the gong.”

Public health is politics as well as science. In politics, timing is everything. The super-bug announcement came shortly after President Bush’s inauguration. The Bush administration is pushing abstinence. As whistleblower Michael Petrelis pointed out, David Ho sits on the science board of ViroLogic, a biopharm that just got a $1.5 million NIH grant to study viral replication during the progression of clinical AIDS. Clinton Fein of Annoy.com acidly added, “The existence of this new strain represents a fantastic opportunity for…legitimizing the government grant.”

In its time, the Lassa fever story helped awaken a legitimate consciousness of how local epidemics can hop on a plane and race across hemispheres. In our time, the HIV super-bug story is pushing a not-so-legitimate policy that obsessively continues to target one demographic group, even as AIDS is characterized as a growing global threat to heterosexuals. The scary story will result in stiffer anti-gay laws and policies—which is exactly what ultraconservatives have demanded since the 1980s.