Ebola In The Hot Zone

A careless choice made by one person can certainly impact the society as a whole in such ways that can be life-changing. No one in the world could have even dreamt of encountering with Ebola, a lethal and deadly virus, with a mortality rate similar to that of the infamous Black Death during the Middle ages which wiped out a third of the world’s population. However, destiny proved them wrong, for Ebola became an explosive topic worldwide with its highly contagious nature. Furthermore, because of its vagueness in modern science, many people carried and transmitted the disease without knowledge of doing so themselves. In the novel, The Hot Zone, Richard Preston describes the horrid consequences that manifested as a result of the inadvertent decisions

In the beginning, a schoolteacher was said to have visited a roadside market and bought fresh antelope meat, which was placed alongside with a freshly killed monkey bought by his friend. He then began to feel sick after consuming the meat which his wife cooked and went to Yambuku hospital for a medicine injection afterwards. However, an ominous event was about to take place when the author mentioned, “At the beginning of each day, the nuns at Yambuku Hospital would lay out five hypodermic syringes on a table, and they would use them to give shots to patients all day long.” (Preston 102). This is a significant issue which assisted the spread of the virus, as the schoolteacher broke out with Ebola and became the first known case of Ebola Zaire. Perhaps he himself contracted the virus, but chances are that other people who came to get shots before him could also potentially harbor the virus, and therefore, transmitted the disease to him through blood contact from the used needles. This can be a possibility because the author wrote “The nuns and staff occasionally rinsed the needles in a pan of warm