Chapter 1: Machupo Summary and Analysis

In Chapter 1, Karl Johnson finds himself deathly ill with Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. In 1962, Johnson was in Panama when his friend, Ron MacKenzie, headed to Bolivia to investigate a disease near Magdalena that local doctors had dubbed the Black Typhus. The patients were sweating, crying, and vomiting blood, and writhing in pain. Returning to Panama after taking blood samples, MacKenzie assured directors, as well as Johnson, that the disease was dangerous. MacKenzie and Johnson both thought the disease was much like a Latin American virus called Junin, which was airborne. Johnson visited Al Wieden, and the two created a portable lab to keep airborne disease from infecting the doctors. MacKenzie and ecologist Merl Kuns arrived in San Joaquin, where the locals believed the virus was born, and they found a highly impoverished village with severe malnutrition, where half the village...