Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (34 page)

At Hindu sites, they have the advantage of their resemblance to the monkey god Hanuman. Buddhism, at least as practiced in Japan, China, and India, also carries ancient threads of monkey veneration. You can see it in iconic art and sculpture, such as the famed three-monkeys carving (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) on the Toshogu Shrine, north of Tokyo. Over generations, over centuries, macaques within these landscapes have come in from the wild and habituated themselves to human proximity. Now they’re mascot monkeys at many temples and shrines, indulged like acolytes of Hanuman or the Shinto deity Sanno, living largely on handouts from pilgrims and tourists.

One such place is the Sangeh Monkey Forest in central Bali, amid the green volcanic slopes and the shapely rice paddies of the world’s most decorous island. There at Sangeh, two hundred long-tailed macaques wait to cadge handouts from the thousands of visitors who traipse through the temple and its little woodland every month. That’s why an anthropologist named Lisa Jones-Engel, of the University of Washington, and her husband, Gregory Engel, a physician, chose Sangeh as a place to study human exposure to monkey-borne herpes B. They knew that the circumstances would be very different from those in a laboratory.

Bali, with a population of almost 4 million in an area barely larger than Delaware, is one of the more crowded human habitats on Earth—but gracefully crowded, ingeniously built up and terraced and irrigated and partitioned, not so squashed and squalid as other densely populous tropical states. Bali is home to most of the Hindus of Indonesia, otherwise a predominantly Muslim country. The little forest at Sangeh amounts to about fifteen acres of hardwoods, providing shade and cover for the macaques but not much natural food. They live instead on peanuts, bananas, cold rice, flower petals, and other treats and offerings, all supplied by temple workers, tourists, and Hindu worshippers. The lane leading into the forest is lined with shops selling souvenirs, clothes, and monkey food. The monkeys aren’t shy about accepting, even demanding, those handouts. They have lost their wild instincts about personal space. Enterprising local photographers run a brisk trade in photos of tourists posed with macaques.
And here’s me in Bali, with a monkey on my head. Cute little guy, just wanted that Snickers bar.
But the cute little guys sometimes bite and scratch.

Engel, Jones-Engel, and their colleagues gathered two interesting sets of data from this place. They surveyed the monkey population, by way of blood samples; and they surveyed the human workforce at Sangeh, by way of interviews and also blood samples. What they found says a lot about the scope of opportunity for virus spillover between Asian monkeys and people.

The team drew blood from thirty-eight macaques, of which twenty-eight were adults, the rest youngsters. They screened the blood serum for evidence of antibodies to herpes B, the same virus that killed William Brebner and most of the other people ever infected with it. The results of the lab work were chilling: Among adult long-tailed macaques at Sangeh, the prevalence of herpes B antibodies was 100 percent. Every mature animal had been infected. Every mature animal had either once carried the virus or (more likely, because it’s a herpesvirus, capable of long-term latency) still did. Among juveniles the rate was lower, presumably because they are born free of the virus and acquire it, as they get older, by social interaction with adults.

Matched against that was the human survey, measuring opportunities for the virus to cross between species. The team found that almost a third of the shopkeepers, photographers, and other local people they interviewed had been bitten at least once by a macaque. Almost 40 percent had been scratched. Some people had been bitten or scratched more than once.

This study, focused on workers, didn’t even attempt to count bites and scratches among the tourists who come and go. The researchers merely estimated that there must be thousands of monkey-bitten tourists walking away from Sangeh each year—and Sangeh is just one such Balinese monkey temple among a handful. The odds of a human contracting herpes B under these circumstances seem vast.

But it hasn’t happened, so far as anyone knows. Engel, Jones-Engel, and their coauthors wrote that “
no case
” of human infection with the virus has been reported in Bali, “either in association with monkey forests or in any other nonlaboratory context.” Thousands of bites, thousands of scratches, thousands of opportunities, and zero cases (anyway, zero reported cases) of humans sickened by herpes B. If that sounds like good news, rather than a spooky enigma, you’re more of an optimist than I am. When I finished reading their paper, still puzzled, I wanted to hear more in person.

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efore I knew it, I was helping Lisa Jones-Engel and Gregory Engel trap monkeys at a shrine in northeastern Bangladesh.

We had come to a city called Sylhet, along the banks of the Surma River, an area where the Bangladesh lowlands begin to wrinkle up into hills. The hills rise northward into mountains, beyond which lie Assam, Bhutan, and Tibet. Sylhet is a district capital, home to a half million people and an indeterminate number of other primates. Its streets are flooded with traffic that somehow manages to move despite a near-total absence of stoplights. Hundreds of green motorbike taxis, powered by natural gas, and thousands of brightly decorated bicycle rickshaws, powered by longsuffering men with skinny brown legs, jockey for position alongside the bashed-up busses and creeping cars. In early morning, two-wheeled pushcarts also roll through the streets, moving vegetables to market. At the bigger intersections loom shopping complexes and upscale hotels behind gleaming glass. It’s a thriving city, one of the richest in this poor country, thanks much to investment and spending by emigrant families, with roots here, who have thrived in Great Britain. They often return home, or at least send money back. Many of the curry shops in London, a man told me, are run by expat Bangladeshis from Sylhet.

Religious tourism also helps fuel the local economy. There are quite a few shrines. And those shrines, besides bringing pilgrims from all over Bangladesh, are what had brought us.

On our first afternoon in Sylhet, we scouted a holy place known as Chashnipeer Majar. It’s a small domed structure atop a hillock that looms above a crowded neighborhood, surrounded below by concrete walls, small shops, blank-faced houses fronting the street, and sinuous alleys. A long staircase led us to the shrine, which was overarched by five or six scraggly trees, one with dead limbs where monkeys perched, shaking the branches like mad sailors in a ship’s rigging. The hillsides around the shrine were covered with ragged brush, trash, and the graves of Sylhetian ancestors. It wasn’t a verdant spot, this little island of sacred ground at the heart of an urban neighborhood, but the resident wildlife didn’t seem to mind. There were macaques on the shrine roof, macaques in the trees, macaques on rooftops of the houses below, macaques climbing drainpipes, macaques crossing power lines, macaques loitering on the staircase and walking its railings, macaques scampering among the graves. Having scouted the place on that first afternoon, we came back two days later, in early morning, to disturb the peace.

Our monkey trap was assembled and ready. It was a frame cube of aluminum tubing and nylon mesh, big as a closet, custom built for this purpose, with a falling door controlled by a remote tripwire. You sat at a distance, you watched, you saw monkeys enter, you pulled the line—and the door came down. But don’t pull too soon. Don’t settle for the first animal that ventures inside. Part of optimal technique for trapping macaques, I’d been told, was to catch as many as possible on the first go, because these critters are smart and they learn quickly. They become trap-shy after seeing the trick worked on their comrades. So whoever holds the tripwire must be patient, waiting for just the right moment, when as many animals as possible are inside the trap.

My assignment was minor: When the door fell, I should get there immediately and lock it down with my foot, so the captured macaques couldn’t widget their way out. Gregory Engel would then do the hard part, tranquilizing them one by one with a hypodermic full of Telazol, a fast-acting veterinary anesthetic. How do you inject a hysterical monkey? In this case, by jabbing into its thigh through the mesh of the trap. Professor Mohammed Mustafa Feeroz, Engel and Jones-Engel’s principal Bangladeshi collaborator, would stand as defense. Four of Feeroz’s students would help. Defense was important because the uncaptured monkeys might charge, frantic to free their comrades. They could be a formidable platoon. Lisa Jones-Engel, chief genius of the whole project but prohibited from entering this shrine because of her gender, would be waiting in a courtyard nearby, along with several female assistants, to begin drawing blood. One, two, three: trap, tranquilize, draw. What could be simpler?

Lots of things, let me tell you, could be simpler.

The trap was baited with puffed rice and bananas. Within moments of seeing the bait placed, a few monkeys came to inspect. They climbed all over the trap, inside and out. Most of the others held back. Word seemed to pass among them, excitement rose, more animals arrived across the rooftops; there must have been a hundred, all nervously curious about our presence and tantalized by the bait. We loitered discreetly, on the steps, on the slope, looking casual and averting our eyes. Feeroz held the trip line. He had the patience of a fisherman watching a bobber jiggle. He waited, he waited, as several of the biggest macaques entered the trap to investigate. One of them, a great male with a Schwarzenegger physique and very long canines, may have been the alpha of the troop. He was bold. Greedy for his share. A few more animals entered behind him. Feeroz pulled.

The door fell, trapping Schwarzenegger plus six others, and all hell broke loose.

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aybe it has occurred to you to wonder: sacred monkeys in an Islamic country? Bangladesh’s population is 90 percent Muslim, mostly composed of traditional Sunnis. Doesn’t Islam forbid graven images and totemism? Aren’t those monkey temples supposed to be Hindu or Buddhist?

Right enough, but with an exception: the Sufi shrines of northeastern Bangladesh, including Sylhet. Chashnipeer Majar is a Sufi site.

Sufism in the region traces back seven hundred years, to a pious invader named Hazrat Shah Jalal. It may be practiced by either Shiites or Sunnis, but it’s a more mystical, esoteric brand of Islam than mainstream Shia or Sunni observance. As the story goes, Shah Jalal came out of the west, from Mecca by way of Delhi, with his army of 360 disciples. Sylhet was a Brahmin kingdom in those years, but a kingdom of faded strength, ruled by a tribal chieftain. Shah Jalal either conquered the chieftain or (depending on which version you hear) scared him into retreat. One among Shah Jalal’s entourage was a man named Chashnipeer, a sort of wizard geologist, charged with finding just the right place for a new kingdom of Sufi believers, where the soil would match Mecca’s sacred soil. Sylhet was it. Shah Jalal and his followers settled in the region and converted much of the populace to Sufism. After a long rule, Shah Jalal died and was buried there. His mausoleum, now encompassed within a large mosque complex in a north neighborhood of the city, still attracts pilgrims from all over Bangladesh. I don’t believe it welcomes monkeys.

But other sites of worship were also established, taking their names from the lesser founding heroes. These were different from normal Islamic mosques; they were
majars
, shrines, implying veneration of a holy personage, whose body might be entombed (like Shah Jalal’s) on the spot. Because this recognition of saintliness can be construed as idolatry—implicitly comparing a mortal individual to God—such Sufi majars may offend against the letter of Islam as understood by Sunni or Shia. They are heterodox. You won’t find them down south in the capital, Dhaka.

Then too, in more recent times, some of the Sylhet majars underwent another stage of transformation. With macaque habitat shrinking as the landscape became farmed and urbanized, monkeys found refuge at the shrines. At first they may have stolen food or picked garbage. Gradually they became half-tame. They learned how to beg food and were accommodated, tolerated, eventually indulged, by the men who looked after those sites. Several majars, including Chashnipeer, became monkey shrines.

People arrived to worship, enjoyed seeing the macaques, gave alms, and came back again, occasionally in great number and from long distances for festivals that involved feasting and prayer. The macaques were novel. They were popular. It was a good business model, pardon my secular soul, for a religious establishment. Some pilgrims believed that if a monkey took food from your hand, your prayers would be answered. The whole arrangement might seem sacrilegious in most parts of the Islamic world, but in Sylhet it became holy tradition.

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ustafa Feeroz is professor of zoology at Jahangirnagar University in Savar, just north of Dhaka. He’s a sweet-spirited fellow, a careful scientist, and an observant Muslim, though not a Sufi. He and Dr. Jones-Engel had of course sought permission to trap monkeys at Chashnipeer Majar, explaining their scientific purposes and their concern that no animals be harmed. That satisfied the committee in charge but not the macaques themselves, who went ballistic when they saw that we had trapped one of their honcho males and a half dozen others, including a female with an infant.

Inside the trap, the captives panicked, bouncing and scrambling across the mesh walls and ceiling. Outside the trap, about eighty other macaques came down from their tree limbs and wires and rooftops, screaming and chattering, surging around us, making moves to attack in support of the hostages. Feeroz and the students had prepared for this moment by picking up large sticks. Now they brandished those weapons, swinging, threatening, smacking the ground, shouting to drive the macaques back. I pinned the door with my foot, as instructed, so that nimble monkey fingers couldn’t unlatch it. The loose animals weren’t easily cowed. They dodged the sticks, backed off, jumped around, screeched all the more, and came forward again, like those infernal winged monkeys in
The Wizard of Oz
. Gregory Engel meanwhile moved to the trap with his syringe and, through the mesh, managed to jab the Schwarzenegger macaque in its thigh; in the same motion, he rammed down the plunger. It was a nifty move, somewhat outside the usual duties of a family-practice physician from Seattle.