Ebola the Unknown Reaper Research Writing Kai Northington Culbertson School Author’s Note This paper was written for the Research Writing class.. Introduction Within the novel The Hot Zone the author Richard Preston writes about an outbreak that occurs in the 80’s. The outbreak was one of a virus called Ebola. Within the story Preston describes how Ebola could have easily be an outbreak that could have reach apocalyptic levels. Preston describes the levels of containment that the C.D.C (Center for Disease Control) put on Ebola and its sister strains. Within the novel describes the effects of Ebola and what is does to human who are affected with it. The Hot Zone also goes into details about how the virus works …show more content…
Luckily, within The Hot Zone it does exactly does “...heading for the level 4 containment known as AA-5, or the Ebola suite. The levels are numbered 0,2,3 and finally 4 the highest level” (Preston,1995, P.59). This shows what level the C.D.C puts Ebola and its sister strains on compared to some other viruses within their facilities. It also show that the C.D.C puts this as a very dangerous virus as it gets one of the highest levels within it. The people who are allowed to handle the virus are also described within the novel “the army starts you in biosafety level 2 and then you move up to level 3.You don’t go into level 4 until you have a lot of experience..”(Preston,1995,P.60). This shows that something a dangerous as Ebola can only be handled by people who can be called “experts” dealing with viruses. Now that it is know what the C.D.C considers Ebola we need to now know why its is placed so …show more content…
Ebola is described as a virus. “A virus is a small capsules made of membranes and proteins…”(Preston,1995,P.83). This helps give a visual for what Ebola is and how such a small thing could be so deadly to things it come into contact with. Like the common cold Ebola also has many different varieties of it self “ Marburg along with two types of a virus called Ebola. The Ebolas were named Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Marburg was the mildest of the three filo virus sisters” (Preston,1995,P.38). This shows that the virus known as Ebola is going to be harder to pin down and contain because of the one and three changes of the diagnoses being one of the sister strains which would halt the efforts to it is figured out what is being dealt with. Now knowing what the apocalyptic “Reaper” is know what being infected by this will lead