Experimental Infection of Monkeys with the Marburg Virus

Abstract

We are indebted to Dr. SIEGERT who kindly provided our starting material of three blood specimens. Two of these were taken from human subjects during the acute phase of the disease . A guinea pig provided the other specimen, after 4 passages of the causative agent in this species. Our first experiment was to establish: 1) whether the Marburg virus is patho-genic for monkeys, 2) whether (and, if so, how) it is transmitted among monkeys , and 3) the disease pattern and pathological changes it brings about in monkeys. Rhesus and vervet monkeys were inoculated. Some of the latter had passed through London on the way to our institute around the same time as had those implicated in the outbreaks of disease in Marburg and Frankfurt. Fig. 1 shows the housing of the monkeys. Each monkeys was in a separate cage. We removed the isolating partitions separating pairs of cages to provide Fig. 1. "iew of cages for the maintenance of monkeys during the experiments the possibility for contact between pairs of monkeys through the lattice work. One monkey only, of each such pair, was infected experimentally, the other not being treated at all. In the same room we also placed four Hhesus monkeys, 1 The investigations reported here were carried out in collaboration with Drs. MAASS and OEHLERT. G. A. Martini et al. (eds.), Marburg Virus Disease © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1971 Experimental Infection of Monkeys with the Marburg Virus 137 1-2 meters from the infected monkeys, which were not inoculated. These served as controls to establish whether the causative agent could be transmitted over a certain distance, as, for example, by droplet infection. The results of the first experiment are shown in Table 1. The extreme right hand column shows that all monkeys-Rhesus or vervet-which were injected with blood died between the 7th and 9th day after injection. Further, all control Table 1. Infection of Cercopithecus aethiops and Macaca rhesus with "Vervet agent"