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The Ebola Virus In The Hot Zone By Richard Preston

1954 Words8 Pages

The #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Hot Zone, authored by Richard Preston works with its main goal of educating society on the sinister topic of the Ebola virus. It endeavors and adequately completes its goal to reveal the terrifying truth of the origins of this pernicious virus to the whole of society. It is due to the fact that the Ebola Virus is both highly deadly as well as an infectious disease that it comes as no surprise that it is characterized as an exotic “hot” virus. While the book takes place in and discusses many different places, the book’s main focus is on the continent of Africa, and the outbreaks that occur there. The first known outbreak of the Ebola Virus was located in a Central African rainforest, during the time when …show more content…

What I read about Ebola, has genuinely terrified me and I have the irrational fear that I will catch the Ebola virus. What scared me the most was when Richard Preston wrote “If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person. But Ebola had drifted across a room. It had moved quickly, decisively, and by an unknown route. Most likely the control monkeys inhaled it into their lungs. "It got there somehow," Nancy Jaax would say to me as she told me the story some years later. "Monkeys spit and throw stuff. And when the caretakers wash the cages down with water hoses, that can create an aerosol of droplets. It probably traveled through the air in aerosolized secretion. That was when I knew that Ebola can travel through the air." (Preston,71). The fact that Ebola could travel through the air made me extremely frightened, due to the fact that I believed that since it was airborne it could, therefore, come into the US and I would have more of a chance of catching it. This, however, is an irrational fear on my part, because if that was the case I would already be infected with the Ebola Virus. If you are someone who likes to be scared or are not easily scared (are you even human?) then this would be the right book for you, but if you are easily frightened and …show more content…

Among them were words such as Envirochem, Filovirus, Abscess, Anthrax, Conduit, Paroxysm, and even more.(Go to the bottom of the page to see the definitions) . Due to the amount of confusing and unknown words in the text I recommend that this book not to be a part of the Freshman ELA Curriculum next year. I have come to make this recommendation because of the level of reading that it requires. I know this might sound a little snobby of me or a little stuck up but I always had quite a high reading level due to a number of books that I have come to read over the years. I believe that I might have had an easier time understanding the text and the words used because of my prior knowledge from previously read

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