Originally Posted by
pangloss
Ha! That angle never even occurred to me, but the story is sort of made up. I had a lab exposure to monkey serum, and I guess a lazy worker in employee health just decided to write "monkey bite" in my record. I don't think that I've ever actually touched a monkey. I found out about the false entry a few years later when I had my TB test read and glimpsed my chart over the nurses shoulder.
That's awful--definitely a much bigger danger than my exposure. As I understand it, monkeys can test negative but then shed virus when they are stressed. The samples I was working with came from "negative" monkeys, but the test isn't entirely trustworthy. (Maybe the tests are better now though. Seems like a decent serology test would be possible.) Mine and my wife's families came to visit for Thanksgiving the following week. I hadn't told them that I might die from Herpes B virus infection, but by that point I was greater than 99% sure I'd be okay (up from about 95% immediately following the exposure). I figured I'd have a little fun with the situation, so I left my giant bottle of Valtrex prominently displayed on the kitchen counter. My wife didn't see the humor in it and disappeared the bottle to our bathroom.