Beyond the obvious point that it might cause an unknown disease, Engel and Jones-Engel have another reason for studying this virus. “It’s a marker,” Gregory told me. “We caught a marker for transmission,” Lisa echoed. What they meant is that the presence of SFV within a human population marks opportunities having occurred for cross-species infection of all kinds. If simian foamy has made the leap from a half-tame macaque to a person—to several people, maybe to thousands of people passing through sites such as Sangeh—then so could other viruses, their presence still undetected, their effects
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A benign virus might provide information for other sinister ones
