OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14352678
RESPIRATORY,UNCONSCIOUSNESS,ANIMAL HANDLER,LACERATION,BRAIN,INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Event description
Monkey handler dies of Herpes B contracted from scratch
Investigation abstract
Employee #1 was a monkey handler who worked at the Naval Aerospace Medical Resea rch Laboratory's monkey breeding colony. He was apparently infected with the Her pes B virus when a monkey carrying the virus scratched him on the arm. The virus attacked Employee #1's central nervous system and caused respiratory failure. E mployee #1 became comatose and was kept alive by life support systems from March 30 until brain functions failed on April 28.
Victim
-
#1 Fatality Age 37 M
- Nature of injury
- 21
- Part of body
- 29
- Event type
- 3
- Source
- 48
- Occupation code
- 487
- Human factor
- 20
- Environmental factor
- 18
- Task assigned
- 1
Codes shown verbatim from OSHA's accident-investigation database. A human-readable decoder is coming in a future release once the accident_lookup2 dictionary is loaded.