The Hot Zone: A Literature Review

In 2014, four cases of Ebola broke out in the United states and over 900 in North West Africa. Of these four cases, only one was fatal. In The Hot Zone, Preston describes the three main filoviruses: Marburg, Ebola Sudan, and Ebola Zaire. Marburg, is often referred to as the cousin of Ebola and is not as fatal as the Ebola virus. Of the two different Ebola strains, Ebola Zaire (named after its origin) is known as the most deadly of all the viruses with an eighty percent fatality rate, and is twice as lethal as Ebola Sudan. The strand of Ebola in the outbreak of 2014 was Ebola Zaire, which has no treatment or vaccine. An outbreak of a hot agent (highly infectious disease) such as Ebola, causes a large sense of panic and creates a state of apprehension.

The owner of the house, Dan Dalgard, would then perform an autopsy on the deceased monkeys in hopes of determining what illness they had. He originally suspected SHF to be the cause of the illness in his monkeys, but was puzzled by his findings from the autopsies. The spleen would be enlarged and was tough like leather, some of the monkey’s would have internal hemorrhaging in their intestines and organs, and many others had blood clots in their body. After seeing such an enigma, he contacted the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and sent them samples to analyze. At USAMRIID, Peter Jahrling and intern Tom Geisbert viewed the samples of the monkey’s cells from the Reston monkey house, and amended Dan’s thought of SHF when they found the virus to be a filovirus. Additional testing was required to determine what exactly the virus was, before a panic began. The intern Tom Geisbert used an electron microscope to view the virus where he discovered it was shaped similar to the Marburg virus. They ran tests exposing the virus to cells of patients with Marburg, Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire; the results concluded the virus located in the monkey house were almost identical to Ebola Zaire. It became apparent that something had to be

The army had recruited a team to help sedate and euthanize the monkeys, collect tissue samples, and bag the bodies of the monkeys. The only catch was, this had to be done in secret. If the media had found out what had really been occurring, a panic would have broken out. The virus was contained and it was inferred that it only affected monkeys as no humans fell ill due to exposure, despite the fact it was the identical sister of Ebola Zaire. This strand of Ebola from the Reston Primate house is now referred to as the Reston virus. The secrecy that was used during this high pressure event helped prevent chaos in the public until the situation was under control. During the 2014 Ebola Zaire outbreak, the US was informed of the situation which helped to some extent, but it also caused for unreasonable panic given the circumstances of the