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So-called "killer flu," caused by rapidly mutating animal influenza viruses, was the subject of this 1998 story by Hillary Johnson in Rolling Stone magazine. The pathogen that devastated the global population in 1918 was an animal virus that mutated into a viral pathogen entirely new to the human race. Outbreaks of influenza around the world continue to worry scientists who struggle to keep up with rapid genetic changes in these highly mutable bugs.

From Rolling Stone: "In 1918, an outbreak of flu killed 30 million people. Could it happen again? The world's leading experts say it's not merely possible, it's inevitable."

     "We all have the emotional sense that we've been lucky so far," says Stephen Morse, director of the Program in Emerging Diseases at Columbia University's School of Public Health. "And I think everyone feels that, you know, it's there--it's brewing. What's tragic is that we cannot predict it...We're all waiting...." From "Killer Flu" by Hillary Johnson

In October of 2003, twelve years after the first Gulf war, Johnson reported on the U.S.'s wholesale employment of radioactive ammunition in Iraq for Rolling Stone in a story headlined, "America's Dirty War."

From Rolling Stone:

      "The weapons of war are quietly changing. The U.S. military's deadliest ammunition is now packed with depleted uranium--radioactive waste left over from nuclear bombs and reactors. These so-called hot rounds penetrate amored tanks like a needle pierces burlap, vaporizing steel in hellfires of 5,000 degrees celsius. Flaming radioactive particles shear off in every direction on impact, igniting fuel tanks and whatever expolosives the target might be carrying. With virtually no public oversight, radioactive weapons have replaced conventional weapons as the cornerstone of American military might. Whenever U.S. troops go to war, depleted uranium supplies the shock and awe.

     "In the anals of warfare, there has been nothing like DU, as it is often shorthanded. In both Iraq wars, and in Afghanistan, the U.S. military used depleted uranium to inflict enormous harm on the enemy while incurring almost none itself. During the first Gulf War, in 1991, "tank-killing" DU rounds brought Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard to its knees in only four days. Military experts estimate that at least 10,000 Iraqis were killed, compared with 147 Americans. In the corridors of the Pentagon, DU munitions quickly earned the nickname "silver bullet," and the Defense Department turned its attention to creating even faster, more powerful weapons systems fueled by depleted uranium..."


"We want the target to be destroyed when we shoot at it. We don't want to see rounds bouncing off. We don't want to fight even. We want to be ahead, and DU gives us that advantage...'"

Col. James Naughton

"Dodge" (left) was a participant in a daring study by New York AIDS scientist David Ho to determine whether administraton of antiretroviral cocktails within days of HIV infection could eradicate the virus from the body. The trial failed. Johnson's first hand account of the experiment appeared in Rolling Stone in 1997.

From Rolling Stone:

"His name is Dodge, and he is a beautiful, extremely thin person--115 pounds--with hollow cheekbones and wide, deep-set eyes. Because he shares his first name with his father, he requests that he be identified only by his surname, Dodge. He doesn't want to cause any embarrassment, should their identities be confused. His wrists look like they could be snapped like dry twigs. A nicotine addiction of some proportion contributes to his neurasthenic presence. When he speaks, he looks at you seemingly without blinking, unless to emphasize points of particular significance. The initial impression is of a gentle guilelessness, and, indeed, you soon realize that Dodge chooses to hide very little about himself.
'I became HIV-positive on my 30th birthday, at the Royalton Hotel,' he says...

And...
"'Bob Gallo says you're just a doc in New York dispensing pills,' [David] Ho is told. It's a reporter's desperate gambit, as well as a rather liberal precis of Gallo's emotional comments about Ho some days before. Ho falls silent...The traditional Chinese home consists of a series of concentric courtyards that separate the family's public and more private living spaces. The more intimate your connection with the family who dwells in that house, the farther into the house you are welcomed. David Ho was born in Taichung, Taiwan, where Ho claimes to have had "an uneventful childhood." His father, an engineer who left during David's boyhood to come to America to further his education and career, waited nearly a decade to move his family. By then, David was 12. He watched a lot of television, using the box to give himself a crash course in English. He absorbed the culture of his new country by watching the Three Stooges and Jerry Lewis movies. But David's Asian roots remain, to a significant degree, deep in the ground. I have been with him nearly two hours and have yet to be invited in. Now, a tiny furrow appears in his once-smooth brow. The first courtyard has been penetrated."

In March of 1998, Self magazine published, "Medical Mystery" by Hillary Johnson, the dramatic story of microbiologist Elaine DeFreitas' discovery of an apparently novel retrovirus in children and adults with "CFS" and their close contacts. The discovery, a critical clue in the "CFS" mystery, fell by the wayside when researchers at the Centers for Disease Control refused to attempt replication of the finding using the microbiologist's scientific protocol.

From Self:
"Elaine DeFreitas was a rising star in immunology at a prestigous biomedical research agency, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, when she received a phone call from an internal medicine specialist in rural Nevada in 1985. The doctor, Paul Cheney, M.D., Ph.D., was seeking her expertise in isolating an unusual pathogen, one now known as a human retrovirus, from human blood samples...Dr. Cheney asked DeFreitas to evaluate blood samples from five people who had fallen ill in Incline Village, a ski resort town at Lake Tahoe. The five were among the nearly 300 people who were believed to be sick with what is today called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). DeFreitas made a discovery that continues to confound researchers to this very day: She detected telltale signs of retroviral infection in four out of the five. In time, the finding led her to discover evidence of a retrovirus in 80 percent of a much larger group of CFS patients...If the disease were, say, Hodgkin's lymphoma, or polio, or AIDS, DeFreitas might have been hailed as a scientific hero. But something very different happened...Some of her supporters--may of them CFS patients and their families--see DeFreitas as the Joan of Arc of twentieth-century medicine, an analogy that offers the scientist little comfort. 'Look at what happened to Joan of Arc,' DeFreitas says today."

"Journey Into Fear: The Growing Nightmare of Epstein-Barr Virus" Part TwoRolling Stone August 1987

From Rolling Stone, Part Two:

"I don't know if it's an epidemic," National Institutes of Health investigator Stephen Straus told Johnson in 1987. "What I can tell you is that my phone rings off the hook, that we get a tremendous number of letters that distract me from doing things I'd like to do and that many very critical, imaginative, scholarly physicians and scientists around the country are also seeing patients with this disorder." Said clinican Paul Cheney of Incline Village, Nevada, "Among my patients, panic has accrued. Marriages have broken up. We also had some patients who have transferred their records to other doctors who don't want to believe this disease exists. And those patients are then told it doesn't exist."


And...
"One mild day in mid-January, I boarded a train for Boston to see Anthony Komaroff, a clinical epidemiologist who is the chief of general medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching hospital associated with Harvard. Ten years ago, Komaroff began to suspect the existence of a chronic-fatigue syndrome, but he said he was unable to find research collaborators who considered it a 'plausible illness.' The doctor put aside his interest in the subject until 1983, when, once again, he saw a patient who seemed to have the complex of symptoms Komaroff thought might be a disease syndrome...Beyond his intuition...Komaroff believed that patients with CEBV provided objective health data "that are just not normal and are not caused by depression or anxiety," including unusual white blood cell counts and slightly abnormal results on liver function tests. "Recurrent sore throats, recurrent swollen glands, low-grade fevers? That is absolutely not the picture of depression or anxiety. I say listen to the patient. The patient is telling you what's wrong with him. 'It's a virus.'"

In 1980, Life magazine sent reporter Hillary Johnson and photographer Harry Benson to report on a first-of-its-kind "shocktrauma" ER unit at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

From Life:
"Most accident victims are rushed there by helicopter--they are young and on the verge of death. At this extraordinary Baltimore hospital they recieve the most advanced trauma care in the world...In the crowded admitting area the activity resembles a field hospital, where the lives of the critically wounded depend on the flow from an intravenous tube and the swift movement of a surgeon's hands. Here the broken bodies are usually those of accident victims, and the pressured, lifesaving effort is being made by a team of the country's most highly trained specialists in the battle against shock. Shock manifests itself by sluggish or failed circulation to tissues and vital organs, a condition that can result in death. These specialists follow a precise, high-speed procedure of diagnosis and treatment with every patient. "When you get a really bad admission here," says one traumatologist, referring to the unit's extraordinary teamwork, "it's poetry in motion."


Shocktrauma ER nurses (far left) were stilled by the death of a 16-year-old who shot himself. Staff in this MASH-like emergency room routinely referred to motorcycles as "murdercycles." Family members hovering in waiting rooms just outside the unit's swinging doors awaited often ghastly news from frazzled attending doctors. A small kindness: relatives were usually too stunned to notice the doctors' blood-soaked shoes.

Johnson arranged Jerry Falwell's introduction to Republican front-runner Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign for the purpose of a "photo-op" (left) for her story about Falwell and the rise of "televangelism" for Life magazine. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, although Falwell never thanked her. Falwell's own successful campaign to turn "moral" issues into political issues was just starting as he embarked upon a series of revivalist-style rallies across the southeast in 1980. Falwell's calculated rants against homosexuals brought two gay men in the audience at a rally on the capitol steps in Columbia, South Carolina, to tears. Falwell routinely called feminists "the losers of the world." He traveled between cities on a small Lear jet he kept stocked with extra-large cans of hair spray for his television appearances and giant Hershey bars for snacks. He often privately requested the pilot to fly the plane upside down to spook passengers--as a joke.

Reporting for Women's Wear Daily from Washington, D.C., Hillary Johnson covered the Commerce and Justice Departments, as well as the cultural and social whirl of the capitol. Her 1976 story about a sudden decline in the composite index of economic indicators shared the paper's front page with a photo of the woman at the pinnacle of New York's fashion culture, the renown Jackie O. Women's Wear followed Jackie's every move with the attention other newspapers devoted to the American president.

In the late seventies, these islands were considered by some to be the last American frontier, a lush paradise where commercial development, local politics, and environmental protectionism were all in play in a southerly expansion of the American sunbelt. Johnson spent a month here for this Town & Country cover story in 1978, interviewing local politicians, descendants of the Danish colonialists, entrepreneurs, landed gentry, celebrities and mainland escapees and eccentrics who came down for a holiday and never left.

In 1985, US and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner wrote this editor's note about contributor Hillary Johnson. Johnson was photographed in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard with one of her interviewees, actor John Matuszak.

From the editor's note: "For veteran journalist Hillary Johnson, being a writer is not an entirely pleasant occupation. 'What I dislike about writing is writing itself,' she admits. 'But the greatest moments are after I send a story off and it's out there in the stratosphere. Then I feel like breaking out the champagne'...Despite the obstacles she had to overcome, Johnson got her story. That tenacity has been characteristic of her since her childhood, when she made up her mind to become a reporter.

"While attending Berkeley, she worked as a stringer for the San Francisco Chronicle, then enrolled for a year of basic training at 'boot camp' (Columbia University School of Journalism). After a reporting job at her hometown paper, the Minneapolis Tribune, and a brief stint at a magazine in Washington, D.C., Johnson joined the staff of Women's Wear Daily. There, she interviewed such luminaries as E.B. White and Irwin Shaw, before being hired in 1978 for the new Life magazine. Her four years on staff took her sailing with Walter Cronkite, touring with Jerry Falwell and campaigning with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden..."

In August 1999, Johnson profiled the uncommonly gifted Swedish actress Lena Olin, who co-starred with Daniel Day Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for In Style magazine. Photography by George Holz

"Oh yes, I like women better than men," Gore Vidal told Women's Wear Daily reporter Johnson in between sips of Scotch, neat, in his suite at the Plaza Hotel in 1978. "Who doesn't?--of anyone who ever thought about it? Women tend to be more interesting even though, paradoxically, their lives seem less so because they are economically stunted. But the life of the slave is always more interesting than that of the master." Later, Vidal noted, "Book reviewing (in New York) has always been filled with personal rage against the writer and that terminal envy that so characterizes New Yorkers."