The black doctor who fainted was Merck, an emergency physician at Kenema Government Hospital.

After resuscitation, Dr. Merck woke up.

Dr. Merck was lying on the hospital bed, his eyes were red, there were darker bleeding spots under the black skin, and his usually white teeth were also stained with blood, which was the result of bleeding gums.

Ye Zhenzhen saw in her eyes that Dr. Merck's current symptoms were like the symptoms of Nan Zhiqiao's Ebola infection, and the symptoms were even more serious.

Dr. Merck was the first medical worker to be infected with the new virus, and Nan Zhiqiao personally came to investigate his past experience.

Dr. Merck had injected the Ebola vaccine as an experimental population as early as the first day of the Ebola vaccine clinical trial, and then participated in the rescue of the first patient, Aelous, who was splashed in the eye by Aelous's blood, and seven days later, there was no illness.

From the current understanding of the new virus, clinical symptoms will appear after seven days of exposure to the new virus, but Dr. Merck's mucous membranes come into contact with the blood of Aelous and there is no onset of illness after seven days, which shows that the Ebola clinical trial vaccine has a certain immune protection effect on the new virus.

Twenty days after being exposed to Aelus's blood, Dr. Merck came to the small town of Case, joined the rescue medical team, and worked every day in a biosafety suit that could filter the air, without being exposed to the new virus, how did he get sick?

After questioning Dr. Merck on the hospital bed, Nan Zhiqiao learned that two days ago, Dr. Merck was pricked in the finger by a needle stained with the patient's blood when he was giving a blood transfusion to a patient.

At that time, Dr. Merck did the emergency treatment herself, took off her protective gloves, squeezed out a few drops of blood, rinsed the wound with running water, and applied iodophor to disinfect it.

Dr. Merck felt that it was okay for Elous's blood to splash directly into his eyes before, and this time he was pricked by a needle, there should be no problem, so he didn't take it to heart.

Unexpectedly, two days after the injury, Dr. Merck became ill, with a short incubation period and a rapid onset.

Nan Zhiqiao analyzed Dr. Merck's situation, the Ebola test vaccine injected at the beginning had a certain immune resistance to the virus in the blood that infected Aelus through the eyes, but after more than 20 days, Dr. Merck came into contact with the new virus through the blood again, and was quickly infected and showed symptoms, which may indicate several problems.

The first possibility is that the new virus has evolved in the population, and the weak cross-immune protection of the Ebola trial vaccine has disappeared.

The second possibility is that the Ebola trial vaccine is against this new filovirus, and the original protective effect is weak, and Dr. Merck is the second time through the bloodstream, a large number of infections with the new virus, and the symptoms of the disease quickly manifest.

Comparing and analyzing the situation in the small town of Keith in the past few days, many patients have been infected without direct contact with the people who have already become ill, which indicates that the new virus has begun to spread through the air, and from this point of view, the first reason is more likely.

Whatever the specific cause, the most important thing now is to find ways to treat and prevent this new virus.

Dr. Merck died two days after she became ill.

Dr. Merck's death was a blow to the entire medical rescue team, and many medical staff began to worry about their own safety.

The nervousness of medical staff can easily be transmitted to patients.

Having just finished receiving the Ebola vaccine, the little hope that had finally been ignited in the town was shrouded in tension.

At this time, news came from the laboratory of the CDC Institute in China that the whole genome sequencing of the new virus isolated from Li Gang's body had been completed.

Nan Zhiqiao flew back the specimen collected from Dr. Merck to China, which was also divided into two parts, one from Guojing Medical Center and one from the China CDC Gaohe Laboratory.

The two laboratories shared data on the new virus, and the special primers designed for the new virus were soon sequenced by Dr. Merck.

The three strains of viruses isolated from Dr. Aelous, Li Gang, and Dr. Merck were all filamentous viruses under the electron microscope, and the genetic material was a single-strand negative-strand RNA virus.

The genetic sequence comparison analysis between the three new viruses showed that the strains isolated from Arous and Li Gang had the same sequence, and the strains isolated from Dr. Merck were very different, and the latter showed obvious mutations.

The results of genetic sequence analysis confirmed Nan Zhiqiao's first hypothesis that the new virus mutated in the population, and the weak cross-immune protection of the Ebola trial vaccine disappeared.

The development of protective drugs against new viruses is urgent.

After Nan Zhiqiao's long-distance authorization, Li Guoyi took the new virus strain isolated from Dr. Merck and went to the experimental animal center of Tinder No. 1 base for screening of special drugs.

Specifically, if you infect monkeys with a new virus and then treat them with antiviral drugs that are screened for possible effects on the virus, you will be able to cure the monkeys.

In addition, vaccines against new viruses have also entered the research and development stage, inactivated vaccines, replicon vaccines, DNA vaccines, subunit vaccines, replication-deficient vaccines, and viral vector vaccines...... Various vaccine types are being developed.

However, whether it is the screening of specific drugs or the development of effective vaccines, the time cycle is very long, and the epidemic in Case Town is urgent.

Nan Zhiqiao thought of all possible emergency solutions.

In between work, Nan no Joe overlooks the rainforest surrounding the town of Case.

From time to time, black smoke rises from the villages and tribes on the edge of the rainforest, which is the black smoke that comes from the people of the tribe when they burn the corpses.

During the day, in the distance, you can still hear the monkey cry from the rainforest, "pit, pit, ......", with a faint vigilance and panic in the voice.

At night, tropical stars hang in the sky and swarms of bats fly in the night sky.

Listening to monkeys during the day and watching bats at night, Nan Zhiqiao suddenly thought of something related to the new virus - the natural host of the virus.

No matter what the natural host of the virus is, the natural host carries the new virus in the body, and the corresponding antibodies will be produced, if the storage host can be found, and the antibodies against the new virus can be isolated from it, and the virus can be treated with antibodies, then the people of Case Town will be saved.

With this idea, Nan Zhiqiao immediately took action.

Nan Zhiqiao found Ye Zhenzhen and Dr. Sky and said his thoughts, and both of them agreed.

The next step is to find a reservoir host for the new virus.

There are many possible reservoirs for the new virus, and to find it, we need to start with the first case of the whole epidemic, Aerys.

Before the onset of the disease, in addition to his normal work life, Elous went hunting in the forest near the South Valley Lumber Mill, stayed in the forest for two days, and captured two monkeys, and during those two days in the forest, he was most likely to come into contact with the storage host.

The trio decided to repeat his trip to the forest according to the whereabouts of Eros at that time.