It’s a little known fact, or perhaps a dark matter best forgotten, but the child care facility on Isaac Newton Square in Reston, Va., was once the epicenter of a new strain of Ebola. Specialists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases not far away in Frederick County, Md., made the initial diagnosis. After consulting with the Centers for Disease Control, they led a team of specialists and soldiers from an animal unit to euthanize the monkeys and test them, as well as sterilize Hazelton. It was December 1989. The CDC was also on the ground – to make sure the monkey handlers at Hazelton were not infected, too. They weren’t. “It turned out, unbelievably at the time, that the strain of the virus that killed the monkeys was almost as virulent as the African strain — even though the caretakers were not infected,” recalled Dr. Frederick Murphy, a pathologist and professor at UTMB. At the time, he was director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the CDC, and one of the high-level officials called to Reston to assess the monkey outbreak. Murphy had been there when Ebola was named in 1976; he was the first person to photograph the virus with an electron microscope. He also helped discover the Marburg virus, a sister to Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan — and now Ebola Reston — in the 1960s. Murphy and other “virus hunters” of the era were featured in “The Hot Zone,” an account of the Reston outbreak and the evolution of Ebola written by Richard Preston in 1995. The book — written like a thriller — is experiencing a resurgence; it was No. 7 on the New York Times Combined Print and e-Book Non-Fiction best sellers’ list in late August before dropping to No. 19 this month.