hotzone

     "The Hot Zone," by Richard Preston, was a true story about the strains of filo-viruses and their effect on the lives of real people from the years of 1967 to 1993. The book was advertised to be, "a terrifying true story," that was New York Times #1 Best Seller, and had great reviews from Newsweek, People, and Time, among many others. All of this hype and propaganda did not over sell the book one bit. I found it to be an incredibly interesting book.
     At the beginning of the book the author has a "To the Reader" page. Here, Richard Preston describes just how factual the book was. All the people and events were true to life, with the only exception being that he changed the names of some characters(and these few instances were noted in the text itself.) The times that he describes a person's thoughts, the information came from interviews he had conducted with them. He says that he tries to see into people, to see what they are thinking and feeling and claims, "what I find there is beyond imagining." As far as I can tell, he is right because I have never read fiction that scared me this much.
      The filovirus family includes four viruses: Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, Ebola Reston, and Marburg Virus. All exist in real life. Ebolas Zaire and Sudan have death rates among the highest ever recorded in history, Zaire's being higher than the death rate of the "Black Plague," of medieval Europe. Marburg is closely related to Ebola, and is also very deadly. It was named after the its first recorded victim. Ebola Reston is the only of the four to have had victims in the Western Hemisphere. The only good thing about it is, it does not take human victims. It is incredibly lethal to monkeys, which are often brought to the United States of America, but not harmful to humans. Lucky for us, because if it was we would have found out the hard way. This filovirus took a number of primate lives in Reston Virginia in 1993. AIDS in referred to in the book as the little cousin of these viruses. With all the hype and fear around the Human Immuno Virus, and AIDS I can't imagine what an outbreak of a human filovirus would do to our fragile society.
      The book was so unnerving that I nearly didn't read it. On the page immediately before the one mentioned about there is an unlabeled page, apparently put there by the publisher. Especially in hindsight, this is perhaps the most worrisome part. It points out that the viruses cannot be passed on except for during its incubation period. It stresses that the life of these viruses are somewhat short, and stresses that none of the people or places mentioned in the book are suffering from infections diseases. I figure if the publisher has to put such a basic, serious message as a preface to the book they must actually be scared of panic.
     There were times as I read that I understood this caution of the possibility of panic. There are many times that stick out clearly in my memory. Among these are two occasions where I can remember physically gasping. The first was when Nancy Jax, of USAMRID, is working with the ebola virus and finds a whole in here space suit. It was so horrifying because her family had been described. Her and her husband's(Jerry Jax, who was also very involved in research on eblola) indecision about whether they had even wanted to get involved in such dangerous work was also discussed in detail. It made me fear for the whole family, as well as for this poor woman who for all she knew had just contracted the most terrible killing virus on earth in the line of duty!
     The other such time was when one of the characters was working in an infected village in either Zaire or Sudan, and went into the hut where they had been keeping all the infected people. The villagers were so scared of ebola, that they were putting the sick into this hut together, unable to take very good care of them, and had put anyone with the similar symptoms of malaria in there as well. This character, who was a doctor, was using a needle on one of the people in these huts, when an other had a seizure. Her sudden motion pushed a needle, that be had believed to have been used on an ebola patient, into his thumb. I remember being so shaken, that I could not immediately continue reading. However, when I finally did I found that this doctor had decided not to leave the village right away, but never got sick. Apparently, the person on whom he had just used the needle had symptoms of malaria that he had mistaken for ebola. Assuredly, a very frightening mistake!
     I can also think of two times where the suspense and drama, as opposed to the shock, was what made my blood run cold. One, was the detailed and graphic descriptions of the symptoms of the filoviruses, and the way they took life. I remember people coughing up their internal organs in black chunks, eventually having the skin on the surface of their tongue tear off. The book says this one of the most painful things, and I would sure believe it!
     The other time of extreme drama was the descriptions of "Charles Monet." Mr. Monet was a Frenchman who contracted one of the filoviruses from the area near Mount Elgon, in Kenya, Africa. People who knew him said that he was very familiar with both bird and monkeys of the area. Either creature could be a possible carrier of the filoviruses. We don't know exactly how he contracted it. However, Mr. Monet came down with the symptoms at a very dangerous time - while flying in an airplane. The suspense of what would happen to him and the other people around him was immense. It was scary to realize that someone could be sick with such a lethal virus, and be anywhere in the world within a matter of hours. What if he had been boarding a plane to Los Angelous, New York, or Tokyo? It was at times like this in the book that I was truly scared because it seems that as much as eighty percent, or more, of the human population of the planet could be wiped out by this horrible virus. Society and civilization could be wiped out. The world as we know it could end, like a giant intergalactic collision or dramatic change in climate killed the dinosaurs, and there is no satisfying defense or precaution that we can take to prevent it. That, I think, is why the publisher had to include such a serious preface to the book. There truly could be panic, and I nearly started it after reading this book.

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