00:01Kitoum Cave
00:02In January of 1980, a 56-year-old French engineer living in Kenya visited Kitoum Cave,
00:09a massive cavern in Mount Elgon National Park.
00:13The cave is famous for the elephants that venture deep inside to mine salt deposits from the walls with their
00:19tusks.
00:20But the cave is also home to massive colonies of fruit bats and centuries of accumulated, dust-dry bat guano.
00:28A week after his visit, the engineer developed a headache, which quickly progressed to a fever and uncontrollable vomiting.
00:36His connective tissues began to dissolve, and he bled from every orifice.
00:40He died from what was later identified as Marburg virus, a close and equally deadly relative of Ebola.
00:48Seven years later, in August of 1987, a 15-year-old Danish boy visiting Kenya with his family also explored
00:56Kitoum Cave.
00:57Nine days after his visit, he developed the same horrific symptoms as the French engineer, and died from the same
01:05virus.
01:05Two deaths, seven years apart, with only one thing in common, Kitoum Cave.
01:11The incidents sparked a major investigation by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
01:20Scientists in full biohazard suits descended into the cave, sampling bats, insects, and the soil, but they found no trace
01:29of the virus.
01:29The cave's secret remained safe, and the mystery of how it killed remained unsolved.
01:36It wasn't until 2007, 27 years after the first death, that the mystery was finally cracked.
01:44Scientists confirmed that Egyptian fruit bats were the natural reservoir for Marburg, but the most terrifying discovery was how it
01:52spread.
01:53The victims hadn't been bitten. The virus was in the guano.
01:58The constant movement of animals in the cave had pulverized the ancient dry bat droppings into a fine airborne dust.
02:06The French engineer and the Danish boy hadn't touched the killer.
02:10They had breathed it in.
02:12With every breath of the dusty cave air, they had inhaled a fatal, incurable virus.
02:20Bro, imagine dying because the air itself said, good luck, you little champ.
02:26Dominican Republic tunnel disaster.
02:30In July of 2015, a private company in the Dominican Republic hired 36 men for a dirty and dangerous job.
02:38They were tasked with cleaning out several long-access tunnels leading to a hydroelectric dam.
02:45The tunnels hadn't been touched in 30 years, and in that time, massive colonies of bats had made them their
02:52home.
02:52When the workers arrived, they found the tunnels filled with bat guano, up to three feet deep.
02:59They were given knee-high rubber boots, hard hats, and shovels.
03:03For respiratory protection, some were handed flimsy, loose-fitting paper surgical masks.
03:08In the oppressive heat of the dark, confined tunnels, many workers found the masks too difficult to breathe through.
03:16Almost half of the men never used them.
03:19They seriously handed the workers paper masks for a tunnel filled with three feet of bat poop?
03:25That's like bringing a napkin to a hurricane!
03:29For weeks, the men worked in the sweltering heat, shoveling their way through three decades of accumulated bat droppings.
03:36With every shovel full, they sent clouds of microscopic dust into the air.
03:42What they didn't know was that this dust was saturated with the spores of a deadly fungus, histoplasma capsulatum.
03:52Soon, the men started falling ill with a severe high fever sickness.
03:58Of the 36 men who entered the tunnels, 30 became sick, 28 were hospitalized, and 9 required intensive care.
04:08Three of them would never come home.
04:12Doctors were initially baffled.
04:15They treated the men for leptospirosis, a common bacterial infection in the region, but the treatment had no effect.
04:22The men continued to decline.
04:25It wasn't until an astute physician, who had trained in Mexico, recognized the symptoms and the clear link to the
04:32bat guano exposure that the correct diagnosis was made.
04:36Histoplasmosis.
04:38But by then, it was too late.
04:41The country had little awareness of the fungal disease and no labs that could definitively diagnose it.
04:47The delay proved fatal.
04:50Their deaths were a direct result of a chain of failures.
04:55Corporate neglect for not providing proper safety equipment and a medical system completely unprepared for the fungal killer lurking in
05:03its own backyard.
05:06Frio Cave Nightmare
05:08In 1956, George Menzies, a 41-year-old entomologist with the Texas Department of Health entered Frio Cave near Uvalde,
05:18Texas.
05:19The cave is a biological spectacle, home to one of the largest bat colonies on Earth with estimates ranging from
05:2710 to 20 million Brazilian free-tailed bats.
05:31The density is so extreme that the walls and ceiling are coated with 300 to 400 bats per square foot.
05:41Menzies was a rabies investigator, and his job was to collect bat specimens for research.
05:47He was a professional, meticulous in his work, and he was certain he was never bitten or scratched.
05:55Weeks later, Menzies began to suffer from partial blindness and convulsive seizures when he tried to drink water.
06:02On January 4th, 1956, the rabies investigator died of rabies.
06:10Three years later, in 1959, a mining engineer exploring Frio Cave for guano deposits also died of rabies, despite having
06:20no memory of being bitten.
06:22Two deaths, no bites.
06:25This presented a terrifying possibility that defied everything known about the disease.
06:33To find the truth, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a landmark experiment.
06:37They placed caged animals, coyotes, foxes, and cats, inside Frio Cave, in enclosures that prevented any physical contact with the
06:49bats.
06:50The only thing they were exposed to was the air itself, thick with the ammonia and aerosolized saliva and urine
06:58of millions of bats.
06:59The results were horrifying. Animals, including a fox and two coyotes, died of rabies.
07:08The experiment proved the unthinkable.
07:12In the supersaturated environment of Frio Cave, the rabies virus had become airborne.
07:19The sheer density of the bat colony created an atmosphere so contaminated with viral particles
07:26that simply breathing was a death sentence.
07:29The case of George Menzies proved that in some of the world's most extreme caverns, the killer doesn't even need
07:38to touch you.
07:40Python Cave Marburg Virus
07:43On June 19, 2008, a 40-year-old Dutch woman on vacation in Uganda visited Python Cave, a popular tourist
07:51attraction in the Maramagambo forest.
07:54The cave was famous for its massive colony of Egyptian fruit bats, which swarmed through the air and hung from
08:01every surface.
08:02During the tour, the woman had direct physical contact with at least one bat as it flew past, a seemingly
08:09insignificant moment in an exotic holiday.
08:12Nine days later, on June 28, she returned to the Netherlands, feeling perfectly healthy.
08:19On July 2, 13 days after her visit to the cave, the first symptom appeared—a fever.
08:26Three days later, on July 5, her condition had deteriorated so rapidly that she was hospitalized.
08:34Doctors were baffled as her illness progressed with terrifying speed.
08:38By July 7, she was suffering from catastrophic liver failure and severe hemorrhaging.
08:44On July 10, lab results confirmed the horrifying diagnosis—Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever.
08:52The next day, July 11, just nine days after her fever began, she was dead.
08:59The source of the infection was the bat she had touched in Python Cave.
09:04Marburg is a filovirus, a close cousin of Ebola and one of the deadliest pathogens on the planet, with a
09:11case fatality rate as high as 90%.
09:15There is no cure and no vaccine.
09:17The virus causes a cascade of organ failure and internal bleeding, leading to an agonizing death.
09:26The most chilling part of the story is that the danger was already known.
09:31A year earlier, in 2007, four miners working in a nearby mine had contracted Marburg and one had died.
09:39Two other tourists who visited Python Cave that same year also contracted the virus.
09:46For this Dutch tourist, a single fleeting touch of a bat in a dark cave turned a dream vacation into
09:54a death sentence.
09:56And anyway, I haven't had a wife to have a skyscraper.
10:04And I am hoping to make her
Comments