The Hot Zone by Richard Preston was published in New York in 1994, consisting of 422 pages. I would rate this book a six because of its sporadic storyline. It provided some scenes that glued my eyes to the pages and made my stomach turn inside out, but overall it was not the type of book preference I would recommend for readers like me who enjoy a book that can keep you on edge and has lots of twist and turns to it. In the late 1900s there were these unknown diseases that were making people die out of nowhere.
This made people all around frightened to their wits. No one knew a cure for it or where it originated from. A disease known as Marburg which was first thought to be found in a guy named Charles Monet, caused him to have massive hemorrhages and clotting. This was a deadly disease which could be caught by the person who has it by as easily as it seeping through an open wound. Marburg is a filovirus which can be comprised with two types of viruses called Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan.
Ebola Zaire is the worst out of the three, killing nine out of ten humans who have it. An incident occurred in Reston, Virginia where monkeys were being transported from the Philippines to a monkey house. Some of the monkeys started to drop dead for some unknown reason, so Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian who cared for the monkeys, contacted the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) to help diagnose the case. Dr. Peter Jahlring, who was a part of the USAMRIID institute, tested the blood of the monkeys.
To his horror it came up positive for Ebola Zaire, the deadliest of the strains of Ebola. This caused a panic in him of which he rushed to his head leader and told him about it. No one wanted an outbreak to happen of Ebola Zaire so the C. D. C. and the army banded together to try and stop this horrific disease from spreading. Dalgard turned the monkey house over to them in which they terminated all the monkeys and bleached and scrubbed down the building to make sure Ebola didn’t live through it.
Later on though they found out it was not Ebola Zaire but a new form of Ebola which they called Ebola Reston. This caused some relief in them, yet they were still on edge. In writing this book the author shows the history of the Ebola virus. It shows in full detail of the encounters people had with it and the suffering they went through to deal with this deadly disease. His vivid details and description of the virus help us understand it better.