ôThe Hot Zone,ö by Richard Preston, outlines the history of the three filoviruses: Marburg, Ebola Sudan, and Ebola Zaire. The account consists of scientific information about the viruses, portrayals of the earliest victims, and descriptions of the medical procedures used to counteract the viruses. The bulk of the book deals with the outbreak of what appeared to be Ebola Zaire at a primate facility on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and the actions undertaken by the United States Army to contain the situation.
Early in 1980, a Frenchman living alone near Mount Elgon in western Kenya traveled to Kitum Cave; seven days later, he became extremely ill. By the time he arrived at Nairobi Hospital, his internal organs had become obstructed with blood clots, and his brain had begun to ôliquefy,ö eradicating his personality (14). In the waiting room of the hospital, he lost consciousness while vomiting huge quantities of black-speckled blood, and began to hemorrhage from all of the orifices in his body. Before dying, he vomited blood onto Dr. Musoke, who subsequently became ill with the same mysterious condition.
Samples of MusokeÆs blood serum were sent to two outside laboratories; results came back that the samples were positive for Marburg virus, about which little was known. Marburg, while an African organism, was brought to Germany by a shipment of monkeys and caused an eruption of sickness and death at a vaccine factory called Behring Works in 1967.
In 1976, a storekeeper in a cotton factory in Southern Sudan became infected with what later was known as Ebola Sudan. Although bats roosting near his desk in the factory may have transmitted the virus to the storekeeper, researchers are not certain about where he became infected. After his death, two other men working at the factory, with desks near the first victimÆs, died of the same disease. The virus eventually spread throughout the region, until it reached the hospit...