His name was William but everyone called him “Sniper.”
I didn’t much like this guy since he got that nickname because of the fact he often
threw his own bodily fluids at the guards, and I have to admit he did so with incredible
accuracy.
I may not have liked the person, but when I witnessed his downfall it looked like something
out of a horror movie.
He was delirious, lots of his hair had fallen out, his eyes were filled with blood, and
later blood started coming out of his ears.
After seeing that we got him to the prison hospital where he died within a day.
He was the first to go, and there would be many more.
Let me start from the beginning.
When Sniper first became ill he just complained of having a fever and a headache, which isn’t
out of the ordinary in a prison.
We sent him to the nurse and indeed the guy had a fever.
This was slightly worrying, since at our particular prison flu shots are not mandatory.
You really don’t want a flu outbreak in a prison so after Sniper had seen the nurse
we sent him to the Special Housing Unit, or the SHU (Shoo) as everyone calls it.
We kept a check on the guy, and anyone who’d been near Sniper had to go see the nurse.
You might not know this, but back in 2009 and 2010 some prisons had a huge problem when
many inmates contracted the H1N1 virus, aka the swine flu.
As you can guess, prison makes a perfect breeding for such diseases.
Men are so close together and a virus can spread quickly.
I remember at the time, the director of the Bureau of Prisons said something about all
inmates at one place touched the same door knob before they went into the chow hall.
They cleaned the knob and then got a guard to stand at the door and open it for the prisoners.
Prison is not a good place to be, for the prisoners or the staff, when there is a flu
outbreak.
That’s why we put Sniper in the SHU.
When a contagious disease hits a prison it spreads like wildfire, so we believed there
was a chance that a lot of other guys could come down with whatever Sniper had.
It wasn’t flu of course, but something far, far worse.
I’ll get round to that later.
In hindsight, we should have left Sniper in the hospital, but instead we thought we’d
just leave him in isolation and keep an eye on him.
I can tell you firsthand, he wasn’t in a good way.
If we had to go near Sniper we wore masks and then later on Sniper’s wing all the
staff were recommended to wear masks.
That was us being very cautious, and I can’t speak for other prisons as to if they’d
have done that.
We actually have an infection control handbook that’s issued by the Bureau of Prisons and
I’ll give you a quick rundown of what that says.
First, when it seems an outbreak of flu is happening or could happen, we are told to
promote good health habits.
This isn’t only for the prisoners, but for the staff, too.
We are told to wash our hands with soap and water and do that frequently.
We followed the handbook rules and we cleaned the place like you wouldn’t believe, and
if you read the handbook, you’ll know it tells you to keep cleaning what it calls “high-touch”
surfaces, such as door knobs a lot of people are going to touch.
We kept an eye on all our prisoners and told them if anyone even felt the smallest fever
coming on then they should call for a guard right away.
Now, I gotta point out a problem with this.
You see, some guys are not exactly terrified of the flu.
On top of that, a lot of guys will try to hide their symptoms because they don’t want
to go into isolation.
Obviously some guys don’t much like isolation – not everyone hates it I should say – but
some inmates have hustles going on and don’t want to lose out on earnings if taken out
of general population.
This is one of the problems when a contagion happens in a prison.
But then more men started complaining of having fevers and they said they felt really awful,
like totally tired and their bones ached like crazy.
One guy said he had the worst headache ever, and another said he had really watery diarrhoea.
This can happen with flu, but the next day I went to check on Sniper and he looked really
weird.
It was like his eyes had sunk.
He looked a bit like the Walking Dead.
His face was totally expressionless, and now I was thinking he had something worse than
the flu.
I didn’t know what was going on since I hadn’t heard anything about his blood tests.
That was about the time we got the order to hand out masks to all the prisoners.
Even that took some time, because to get those masks we had to get the green light from the
Bureau of Prisons’ Medical Director.
We isolated everyone who fell ill and tried our best to reduce their fever with medications.We
still weren’t informed what virus the guys were coming down with.
Most guards thought it was the flu, but I wasn’t so sure about that.
If those lab results pointed to a non-seasonal flu pandemic then sick people would get antiviral
medication, and then we could start giving an antiviral prophylaxis to all non-ill prisoners
if that got approved by the regional medical director.
The thing is, we didn’t know for a while what we were dealing with.
We were just told that if anyone started complaining that they were having breathing difficulties
then we should send them to the prison hospital and they would be put under observation.
More people got sick and so we put as many as we could into isolation but after a while
we didn’t have enough space so we had to put all the sick together in a special unit.
It was now starting to look really bad.
We stopped prison transport if it was possible, and if not, we checked on a prisoner’s health
before he left the facility.
As for the guys staying in the large dorms, we just told them to stay clean, wear their
masks, and stay within six feet of other prisoners... if indeed this was even possible.
I know like I am making this sound like it happened over a long period of time, but it
wasn’t...
I am talking about a few days.
It was then that Sniper started looking like something from a horror movie.
We sent him straight to the hospital, but he was in a really bad way when we were taking
him there.
He had soiled himself, was throwing up, and his body looked like it was all bruised-up.
He was delirious, psychotic, and I don’t even think he knew where he was.
I left him with the nurse, but later found what happened.
I was told blood had started coming out of his nose and ears and eyes.
The poor guy went into a coma and died after that.
That’s when a few other inmates started showing worse symptoms.
Then we got the news that the whole prison was in lockdown and even the staff had to
leave.
All of us were put into quarantine, and we were informed about what was happening.
What some of the prisoners were suffering from is called the Marburg virus.
It’s about as bad as viruses get and there’s no cure.
Like the Ebola virus, it’s what’s known as a hemorrhagic fever, meaning it causes
severe bleeding and sometimes organ failure.
It comes from animals and can be passed to humans, and then from human to human, but
how it got into the prison is still being investigated.
It might have come from outside the prison and Sniper got it when being visited,but we
just don’t know.
Marburg virus in the USA is a big deal, in fact, it’s the scariest news you could think
of.
The virus can incubate in the body for two to twenty one days, so people can have it
and not show symptoms for quite a while.
Just because Sniper showed severe symptoms first doesn’t mean he was the first to get
it in the prison.
The thing is, once you do show symptoms the bad stuff can happen really fast.
Generally after five days of having what can look like a bad flu, you can become delirious,
have problems breathing, start hemorrhaging, and if you do die then that might happen anywhere
between eight and sixteen days.
It’s worse for some than for others, but if you get it will likely take months to fully
recover.
How it got into the prison as I said is still unknown, but since it’s been found in animals
in Africa then it’s likely someone brought it to the US by someone who’d got up close
to an infected animal.
It spreads via bodily fluids, and since humans emit fluids from lots of parts of our bodies,
the virus can contaminate just about any area in a prison.
That’s why when we were quarantined anyone who went near us wore special personal protective
equipment.
It’s got a really high mortality rate, too.
The worst case was the outbreak in Angola in 2004 to 2005.
252 got infected and 227 of those people died.
The reason it’s called the Marburg virus is because a bunch of Germans in the town
of Marburg got it in 1967.
That was a consequence of scientists looking to make vaccines and coming into contact with
infected monkeys brought from Africa.
There were seven survivors from the 31 people infected.
As for how many of our prisoners have died, I’ve been told the number is now in double
figures.
That prison handbook I told you about was written mostly with the spread of flu in mind,
and so what happened in the prison after I was quarantined would have been like nothing
else the prison-world has ever seen.
I’ve been told that anyone who entered the place had to wear a hazmat suit
These would be level C suits, which means they are fully sealed.
The Marburg virus is about as bad as you can get in the virus world, and that’s why the
World Health Organization gives it a Biosafety level 4 grade.
That’s the highest there is.
That level means that people are dealing with pathogens that can be transmitted and can
cause death.
I am guessing that all the prisoners that haven’t shown any symptoms are now in quarantine.
Those that have shown symptoms are likely either dead or in a specially designed hospital
that is sealed and where Biosafety level 4 precautions are taking place.
Even the dead will be specially buried to prevent further spread of the disease.
You might be thinking that my story is out of this world, but you can find lots of evidence
of prisons and jails in the U.S. having taken seriously the possibility of such a disease
spreading.
Prisons in the past have screened prisoners for Ebola, and like I said, that’s very
similar to the Marburg virus.
All it really takes is for someone to do a bit of travelling and then get imprisoned,
or for someone who isn’t yet experiencing the symptoms to infect a prisoner they are
visiting.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons actually has a protocol for Ebola, and that mainly involves
screening any prisoner that has been to any country in Africa where the disease has been
prevalent.
I’m guessing the protocol for Ebola is the same for the Marburg virus, and so that will
mean I’ll be staying in this quarantine facility for at least 21 days.
I can tell you that it’s not a nice feeling having people in hazmat suits walk around
you all day.
At least I haven’t shown any symptoms, but I’m not sure if any other staff have because
we are not all together.
It might seem weird to you that we have to stay here this long even though we are asymptomatic,
but they really want to make sure we pose no risk.
As for the inmates, they are no longer being guarded by guards like me, at least inside
whatever facility they are being quarantined in.
Any guards that are near them to ensure they don’t cause trouble or try and break out
will have to wear personal protective equipment that has been recommended by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Those people will also have had to undergo some training from the CDC.
You’ve got to remember that if a prisoner should escape it would be the worst escape
ever for the authorities, because that could mean an infected inmate going out into the
public and creating a nightmare in America.
I remember hearing about a case of a man in Uganda escaping from a prison hospital and
he was one of a few men who were suspected to have been infected with the Ebola virus.
The authorities said at the time they were really worried that his tests might come back
positive.
After that, all the other prisoners were cuffed to their beds.
I’m not sure if that’s what’s going down in the hospitals and quarantine facilities
where our inmates are being kept, but I can tell you this, those places will be very heavily
guarded.
As for the clean-up operation, I’ve heard that the entire prison will have to be disinfected
with products sanctioned by the Environmental Protection Agency.
This will be a long and arduous task, so I imagine after inmates have been through their
quarantine period and pose no risk, they’ll be transferred to another prison.
Only certain companies that have experience in cleaning biohazard scenes cleaning will
do the cleaning, and any materials in the prison that have possibly been contaminated
will be transported and disposed of by professional teams.
Who knows, the prison is such a big place, they might decontaminate it and then seal
the place off.
They might even destroy it.
Does this mean I’m out of a job?
I hope not.
In fact, I very much doubt it, because us prison guards are in high demand.
It ain't an easy job that’s for sure, and we aren’t exactly swimming in money.
You’d think after what I’ve just been through that we might start getting paid a
little better.
After watching that, you’re definitely going to want to see this, “Diseases That Will
Kill You The Quickest.”
Or if you’ve had enough of disease for now, take a look at this video...