Chapter Summary Of The Hot Zone

The Hot Zone follows the true events of an Ebola outbreak at a monkey facility in Reston, Virginia in the late 1980s. In order to contextualize the danger, Preston provides crucial background information about several other viral outbreaks, particularly in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The book begins in Kenya in 1980, where Preston describes the death of Charles Monet due to Marburg virus. He goes into great detail describing the vividly bloody death in order to provide the reader with an immediate sense of the virus as a predator with the potential to decimate a large population. He then provides information about the first Marburg outbreak in a vaccine factory in Marburg, Germany in 1967. Over the next few chapters, the book describes

He highlights the outbreaks of Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire, which simultaneously appeared in dozens of villages as a result of the use of dirty needles and poor living conditions within those villages. Amid the horrific outbreaks and victims of the filoviruses, Preston also focuses on several American scientists and military personnel who spend their lives within “space suits” researching hot agents. Despite the dangers surrounding them at every corner when working with lethal viruses, each of these scientists strive to learn as much as possible, in the hopes of one day finding a vaccine that will save the human race. As the book continues, we see that a monkey facility in Reston, Virginia is marked as a “hot zone” with a new, unknown strain of Ebola wandering in and out of the monkey facility infecting and ultimately killing many who inhabit it. While the SWAT team is tasked with entering the building and euthanizing hundreds of monkeys in the facility, they must also keep in mind that if the news of a lethal virus got out to the public it would ultimately would cause even more chaos. At the end of the book, we finally find out that all of the employees who had worked at the monkey house had tested positive for Ebola though they were never affected by

suburb. It is also known that Preston was learning more about Ebola and Marburg while writing and researching material for the book. While the book covers a very broad range of materials, there are still some obvious questions that the text could not answer. That being said, many scientists do not even know the answer to the very same questions that we have. Ebola is a mystery to most simple because no one knows where it comes from and from what animal humans contract it from. Preston’s usage of different styles of writing maintained the interests of reader. As he went, Preston defined or elaborated on subject material that he thought that the reader might not have known about thus making the reading easier to understand. Richard Preston’s book The Hot Zone was a very well-written book that talked about the mystery and fear that people had during a time of chaos where Ebola threatened to destroy the human race. Preston’s knowledge over Ebola and Marburg helped the readers to understand the situation. In conjunction to my topic about infectious diseases, The Hot Zone was the perfect book to read. It gave insight into how Level 4 Hot viruses are spread and how easily it can decimate a