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Ebola Virus In Richard Preston's The Hot Zone

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The Hot Zone is a New York Times best seller written by Richard Preston that was published in 1994. It is a non-fiction, thriller, was published in 1994. The component that makes The Hot Zone horrifying is provided by the true story of an outbreak of the Ebola virus that is caused by monkeys, near Washington D.C. in the 1980’s. The fear was that it could have spread to the surrounding human population in Washington D.C. It all begins with one man, one cave, and one host that could have wiped out the entire population of the planet one by one until there was no species left. The first part of the book is about a man named Charles Monet that Preston gave the fictional name to. Monet was a French emigrant who began showing symptoms of Marburg …show more content…

The first part of the book included the first known cases of Marburg disease. The Marburg disease became available in Marburg, Germany in 1967. Also, the well-known stories of Yu G. who was the first person to die from Ebola Sudan in 1976, and Mayinga N., a nurse who became infected with Ebola Zaire after helping treat a patient who dies of the disease. At first, Mayinga was in denial about her abnormal symptoms and spent two days in the city around thousands of civilians exposing her infection to everyone around her before going to the hospital, she ended up dying just like Monet. Another story consisted of a Lieutenant Colonel, Nancy Jaax. Jaax was a veterinarian and scientist for the U.S. Army during the 1980’s. She was working on an experiment involving Ebola. While she was at home making dinner she accidentally cut herself leaving a huge gash on her palm. Later that day when Jaax was working on an experiment that involved a contaminated dead monkey, the glove on her hazmat suite protecting the cut on her hand tore and Jaax was almost exposed to the contaminated monkey blood. However, Jaax made it safely through the incident. She was eventually promoted to chief of pathology for USAMRIID (US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) after convincing her worried husband that she was smart enough to deal with these deadly Biosafety Level 4

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My assigned book is the hot zone by Richard Preston, the book demonstrates about a highly contagious and lethal virus that is known as “Ebola virus” that is divided into two types the Ebola Zaire and the Ebola Sudan. The writer also mentioned about other filo viruses such as the Marburg virus and rabies. The hot zone book illustrates the origins of the virus and how it started to disperse from one person to another or from a region to another. And how epidemiologists, scientists and doctors discovered about the origin, structure, the effect on the body, symptoms that it can cause, treatment or cure and the nature of the pathogen. As well as several cases of different patients that had an experience of the disease without knowing the actual

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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.

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