The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
For most of the public, until the first case of Ebola hit the news, the disease wasn’t something that a lot of people worried about. Sadly, there are still some people completely unaware of the significance of this first case.
Many Americans didn’t think Ebola was something to be worried about. Now it is. There’s a lot of misinformation about what Ebola is and where it originated from. There’s also misinformation about how contagious it really is and how easily it can be spread from person to person.
Before the disease wipes out thousands of people in America, you need to know the best way to prepare to fight this disease. The first step is to know what you’re up against so that you can defeat it.
Most people don’t know enough about Ebola to protect themselves and their loved ones. They don’t realize that there is more than one type of Ebola. Richard Preston’s book, The Hot Zone, shares details about this deadly disease.
The book is a true story that most people wish was fictional. The reality of what’s happened before and after the spread of Ebola is shocking. The tiny little pathogens behind the world’s deadliest diseases are explained in this book.
Among those diseases that Richard Preston writes about is the Marburg virus. This virus first came to light in the late 60s. It got its name because of the lab where one of the outbreaks took place in Germany.
The disease came from monkeys brought over from Uganda. Exactly how the disease is given to humans by the monkeys has never been identified. Guess what else shares the same characteristics?
The Ebola virus. Like the Marburg situation, Ebola was deliberately brought to the U.S. to be studied. One part that the author discusses and most of the public never heard about, is the Ebola outbreak in the late 1980s in Virginia.
This outbreak was first noticed after the deaths of multiple lab monkeys. The outbreak had the potential to cause widespread contamination among humans and the story was kept very quiet so as not to cause a panic among the public.
The same words about not causing a panic among the public are being used today with this strand of the Ebola virus. People are reading the news and getting upset that the Ebola virus is here.
What they don’t understand is that the virus has been here before. It’s in laboratories across the nation and officials still don’t know with 100% certainty what to do about possible major outbreaks like you’ve seen occur on the news.
They don’t know what cures it even after all of the studies conducted on the disease. They have some trial medications, and some have worked, but not a big supply.
In the book The Hot Zone, the author gives shocking detail after detail about what the Ebola virus does in the body and where this one came from. Although the book has 448 pages, the graphic detail will keep you reading until you’ve read the very last page.