Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses

Around the World.

By C. J. Peters and Mark Olshaker.

Illustrated. 323 pp. New York:

Anchor Books/Doubleday. $23.95.

BEFORE the late 20th century, public health work ranked somewhat low on the charisma scale. Then came ''The Hot Zone,'' by Richard Preston, and suddenly tropical medicine was a glamour industry of mythic dimensions. ''Virus Hunter,'' the life story of C. J. Peters, will add to the craze. Dr. Peters was the physician-virologist who in December 1989 led the Reston biohazard operation, in which a team of Army medics and veterinarians euthanized about 500 cynomolgus monkeys, some of them infected with Ebola virus, in the Virginia suburbs a few miles west of Washington. Readers of ''The Hot Zone'' will also remember Dr. Peters as the man who, low on food in the wilds of Africa, took to eating termites: ''Popping termites in his mouth, C. J. would make remarks like, 'They have this extra . . . mmm . . . ,' and he would smack his lips, smack, smack, and you'd hear a mouthful of termites crunching between his teeth, and he'd spit out the wings, pah, ptah.''

''Virus Hunter,'' written by Dr. Peters with Mark Olshaker, often rises to these bizarre elevations. After all, this is a man who, as a student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was not above handing out severed body parts, including hands and penises, to unsuspecting acquaintances after dissecting cadavers in anatomy class. Later, in a scene out of ''The Godfather,'' some ranchers in Costa Rica cut the head off a dying horse, put it on a DC-3 and shipped it to Dr. Peters for testing (it was filled with VEE -- Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus). Later still, one of Dr. Peters's colleagues injected himself with Junin virus (which causes Argentine hemorrhagic fever) just to prove that he'd really isolated the pathogen. ''He threw himself a party, where he announced what he'd done,'' Dr. Peters writes, ''and before he was even fully over his hangover he started feeling symptoms.''

Virus hunting is not normally the stuff of comedy; the whole business is rooted in sickness and death. Still, Dr. Peters is upfront about the mixed feelings occasioned by a newly breaking epidemic: ''You don't want anything bad to happen, but if it's big, you don't want to miss it and let someone else get the action. 'Dear God,' we all secretly implore, 'please don't let this happen. But if it does, let it be on my watch.' ''

He has been lucky in this regard: it was on his watch as chief of the special pathogens branch of the Centers for Disease Control that hantavirus broke out in New Mexico in 1993 and Ebola erupted in Kikwit, Zaire, in 1995. Before that he rode into outbreaks of Junin virus in Argentina, Machupo virus in Bolivia and Rift Valley fever in Egypt. As a result of these experiences, Dr. Peters excels at describing the symptoms and medical mechanics of viral hemorrhagic fevers: vital organs don't ''melt'' in his account, nor do they liquefy or turn to gumbo. What happens to them is revealed in neutral, clear and clinically exact language: ''Liver function tests will reflect small areas where the tissue is rotting, urinalysis shows microscopic evidence of countless foci of bleeding within the kidneys, the surfaces of the organs are covered with pinpoint hemorrhages and oozing plasma. These small bleeding points . . . are the visual evidence of the innumerable sites of damage to small blood vessels throughout the body and they are also present on the skin and the surfaces of the eyes. This diffuse destruction . . . is what leads to the failure of many organs in the body and, ultimately, to death. The dramatic hemorrhages seen in many patients are just a reflection of the end stage of the underlying process of multifocal microvascular damage, a death of a thousand cuts, if you will.''

Despite such horrific effects, Dr. Peters is fairly anti-apocalyptic when it comes to the ultimate import of viruses. Challenging the widespread perception that exotic viruses are doomsday agents bent on wiping out the human species, he notes that ''we have not documented that viruses have wiped out any species.'' As for the notion that we're surrounded by ''new'' diseases that never before existed, he claims that ''most new diseases turn out to be old diseases''; one type of hantavirus infection, he suggests, goes back to A.D. 960. And in contrast to the popular belief that viral epidemics result from mankind's destruction of the environment, Dr. Peters shows how the elimination of a viral host's habitat can eradicate a killer virus and prevent future epidemics. This is what happened when the Aswan Dam, completed in 1971, destroyed the floodwater habitat of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, carriers of Rift Valley fever virus: ''After the Aswan Dam was constructed, there was no more alluvial flooding. . . . Without a floodwater mosquito, the virus can't maintain itself over the long haul. . . . By 1980, Rift Valley fever had essentially disappeared in Egypt.''

Still, Dr. Peters isn't totally averse to doomsday thinking, and in his final chapter he lays out his own fictional disease scenario, in which a mystery virus from Australia suddenly breaks out in a Bangkok slum. Throw in Malthus, chaos theory and the high mutation rates of RNA viruses, and soon he's got the world teetering on the brink of viral holocaust in the finest Hollywood tradition. But he doesn't know quite what to make of his own scenario. He offers ''one valid, simplified equation to describe what we can expect from viruses in the future'': mutating viruses plus a changing ecology plus increasing human mobility add up to more and worse infectious diseases. Two pages later, though, he says that ''it is impossible to gauge how the actions of man will impact on emerging infectious diseases.'' If that is true, it discredits the very equation he's given us. In the end, he presents no clear or consistent picture of the overall threat posed by the viruses he discusses.

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The empirical fact of the matter is that today's most glamorous viruses -- Marburg and Ebola -- have killed minuscule numbers of people compared with the staggering death rates of pathogens that go back to disease antiquity. Marburg virus, discovered in 1967, has been known to kill just 10 people in its 30-year history; Ebola has killed approximately 800 in the 20 years since it appeared in 1976. By contrast, malaria, an ancient illness, still kills a worldwide average of one million people annually -- more than 2,700 per day. More than three times as many people die of malaria every day than have been killed by Ebola virus in all of history. Yet it's Ebola that people find ''scary''!

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