"The Hot Zone

"The Hot Zone," 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 "liquefy," 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 Musoke's 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.

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The relatively high kill rates of the two Ebola viruses meant that people died "so fast that they didn't have time to infect other people before they died" (69). After violent outbreaks among monkey and human populations, the Ebola viruses seemed to disappear suddenly, causing researchers to speculate that the illnesses were not airborne, but transmitted by direct contact, through blood and other bodily substances. In 1989, at the Primate Quarantine Unit in Reston, Virginia, a group of monkeys in a room died overnight from a mysterious illness. The veterinarian in charge, Dan Dalgard, ordered the rest of the animals in that room to be sacrificed so that the illness would not spread, and sent samples of the dead monkeys' tissues to a lab at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Days later, Dalgard found that five monkeys had died in a room two doors down from the first affected room, meaning that the virus had spread and that, strangely, it had skipped a room. USAMRIID came to two conclusions: that the illness was probably Ebola Zaire, since the tissue samples reacted to that virus in the laboratory, and that it could well be airborne. In 1986, Army researchers had exposed monkeys

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