People · 1964-1974
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A retired Chicago nurse came to a mission hospital in the hills of Borno at 65. In January 1969 she caught a fever nobody could treat. Her illness, and the nurses who cared for her, put a small Nigerian town's name on one of the world's most feared viruses.
Most people start a new life far from home when they are young. Laura Wine did it at sixty-five. She had spent her working years as a nurse in Chicago, and when she retired, she did not sit down. Instead, in 1964, she came to Nigeria to put her skills to work for the Church of the Brethren mission.
The Brethren had been working in the north east for decades by then, running churches, schools and hospitals in the country around Garkida and Lassa. The mission's own history is honest that this work had a cost. Several of its workers died in Nigeria, the first being Ruth Kulp and her newborn baby in 1924. Laura Wine would become the best known of them, though not in any way she could have planned.
At the Lassa Mission Hospital she became head of obstetrics, the department that looks after mothers and the birth of babies. Her friends Dr John Hamer and his wife Esther, who worked with her, later remembered her with real affection. They wrote of her broad, motherly face, her quick and lively walk, and her cheerful spirit. She was the sort of colleague who made a small hospital feel like home.
In January 1969 she fell sick. It was not a fever anyone recognised, and it did not respond to anything the hospital tried. Dr Hamer was at that time the only doctor in Lassa, and he and Esther made a hard decision. Laura needed a better-equipped hospital, and the nearest one that could help was Bingham Memorial Hospital in Jos, run by another mission, the Sudan Interior Mission, known as SIM. Jos was about 500 miles away.
Getting her there was not simple. The Nigerian civil war was raging, and ordinary civilian flights were restricted. Other Brethren mission workers worked to arrange for a plane, and Laura was flown to Jos with the Hamers beside her. It did not save her. Every treatment failed, and she died the next day.
The story might have ended as a sad but private loss. It did not, because the sickness did not stay with Laura. It passed to two SIM nurses at Jos who had helped care for her.
The first, Charlotte Shaw, died of it. The second, Penny Pinneo, also fell ill with the same fever. This time the doctors did something that would change medicine. They flew Penny Pinneo to New York, and with her they sent samples of tissue and body fluids taken from the patients who had already died.
In New York she was treated at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center for more than nine weeks, and she lived. Meanwhile a specialist in tropical diseases there worked with a team from Yale University, from its Arbovirus Laboratory and its department of public health and epidemiology, to find out what had made these women so sick. They identified a new and deadly virus. It was named after the town where the first known patient had worked and fallen ill: Lassa.
Because Penny Pinneo had survived, her blood held antibodies against the virus. The scientists used them to make an anti-serum, a treatment drawn from a survivor's blood. And here the mission's history notes a sad twist. The first person whose life was saved by that anti-serum was not a patient in Nigeria. It was a laboratory researcher who had caught Lassa fever while studying the virus. Another researcher died of it. After that, Yale destroyed its samples and stopped working on the virus altogether. Lassa fever then became the very first job given to a brand new laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
The virus was not finished with Jos. Late in 1969 Lassa fever broke out again in the Nigerian community around the city. A number of people died, though others pulled through. Once more the sick were brought to the SIM hospital, and once more the people caring for them caught it. Hospital staff died, among them a mission doctor, Dr Jeanette Trout. Then the outbreak faded, and for a while the fever seemed to vanish from the area.
But the search went on. For months and years afterwards, medical researchers kept looking for the virus in Nigeria and in other African countries. Penny Pinneo, as a survivor whose blood could provide anti-serum, travelled with the virus experts to places where outbreaks might have happened or were happening. In the end a researcher working from Atlanta found where the virus was living between human outbreaks: in a particular species of rat.
The story drew wide attention. In 1974 the writer John G. Fuller told it in a book called Fever! The Hunt for a New Killer Virus, published by Reader's Digest Press, and a shorter version ran in Reader's Digest magazine that March. A television documentary followed, much of it filmed at Lassa and Jos.
That same July, John and Esther Hamer wrote about it for the Brethren magazine, Messenger. They reviewed the book, and they told their own side, about nursing their friend and about everyone, Nigerian and American, who did all they could in the middle of the crisis.
They described her funeral at Garkida. The church was packed with Nigerians and missionaries grieving together. Laura was buried on a hillside in the Garkida mission compound, near the graves of other missionaries and of children who had died there before her. The Hamers added a careful thought. Others, they said, may well have had this disease before Laura Wine, local people, travellers, missionaries. But she was the first patient anyone identified with it. That is why, when the world says the name of this virus, it says the name of a small town in Borno.
