The Hot Zone is a best-selling 1994 non-fiction bio-thriller by Richard Preston about the origins and incidents involving viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly Ebola viruses and Marburg viruses. This book is based upon an outbreak of the Ebola virus in a monkey house located in the Washington, D. C. suburb of Reston, Virginia. The author weaves together the tales of several previous outbreaks in Africa to describe clearly the potential damage such an outbreak could cause. The first appearance of an Ebola-like virus takes place in Kenya and costs the life of a French emigrant named Charles Monet.
The Hot Zone is a best-selling 1994 non-fiction bio-thriller by Richard Preston about the origins and incidents involving viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly Ebola viruses and Marburg viruses. This book is based upon an outbreak of the Ebola virus in a monkey house located in the Washington, D. C. suburb of Reston, Virginia. The author weaves together the tales of several previous outbreaks in Africa to describe clearly the potential damage such an outbreak could cause. The first appearance of an Ebola-like virus takes place in Kenya and costs the life of a French emigrant named Charles Monet.
His bloody, painful death is re-told in graphic and terrifying terms. Hospital personnel treating Monet become ill as well, demonstrating the extreme danger of exposure to this disease. Through this thriller story, many interesting details take place and the reader might not realize the parts of biology in this book. During this book, scientists at an Institute examine and test the virus to find out how it affects the human body. The first case infected with Marburg was a man named Charles Monet. He was a man who went to travel with his lady to Kitum Cave. While at the cave, he explores it and sees black-guano.
Once he sees this he touches the guano and eventually gets sick. What Monet didn’t know was that he was infected with Marburg. When Monet’s vomit lands on the floor, he immediately gets admitted into the emergency room and is attended by Dr. Musoke. Then Dr. Musoke tried to open his airway by inserting a breathing tube in order for his lungs to get oxygen, and that is when Monet vomits. Black vomit comes out and this time lands in Dr. Musoke’s eyes. Monet goes into a deep coma and dies. The doctors never knew what Monet died of. The black vomit that Monet threw up in Dr. Musoke’s eyes was the virus’s way of getting from host to host.
So the vomit that landed in his eyes was the virus’s home, but now Marburg would take Dr. Musoke as its host, and become its next victim. After some days, he went to his physician named Dr. Bagshawe. She gave Musoke a surgery that would remove a gallstone from his liver. During the surgery, Musoke’s liver was swollen. He then started to bleed profusely, and didn’t stop. The surgery ended because of the unstoppable bleeding, and that was when Musoke started to deteriorate rapidly. Musoke survived the virus. A doctor named Dr. Silverstein took Musoke’s case, and took samples of his blood to further investigate the virus.
A second case of viruses in this book is Ebola. Nancy Jaax is a veterinarian of the U. S. Army. During the Ebola project experiments; there were complications that resulted in two healthy monkeys dying. In a hospital in Zaire, a nurse named Mayinga was infected with Ebola from a nun who was also infected with Ebola and died. The nun had bled to death all over nurse Mayinga, who also died. This case was where the name Ebola Zaire came from. In the experiment, there were two sick monkeys infected with Ebola Zaire. All of a sudden, the two healthy monkeys got infected. Nancy then found out that Ebola could travel by air.
As stated in the book, “They were Ebola Crystalloids bursting out of the lungs. The lungs were popping Ebola directly into the air”-Nancy Jaax (364). The veterinarian in charge of the unit was Dan Dalgard. Over the course of three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys started to die. Days passed, and a handful of monkeys were dying rapidly every week. Dan decided to pass on the case of a dead, infected monkey named Monkey O53, to the Institutes’ scientist Peter Jahrling. Jahrling was interested in the case of monkeys. An intern named Tom Geisbert was the person to examine the dead monkeys’ liver cells with an electron microscope.
He finds that the cells were loaded with tons of virus particles that were ready to explode, and decided to take some pictures of his findings. While the Army was dealing with the Ebola findings, Jahrling was experimenting Monkey O53 for Ebola. The results concluded that the monkey tested positive for Ebola, which meant that the monkey house was on the verge of being completely infected with Ebola Zaire. After a second experiment, Jahrling was positive that the monkeys were infected. A game plan was created to try to stop the virus at the monkey house, along with the help of the CDC.
At the monkey house, Dan finds out that one of the monkey caretaker’s got sick. The Institute was able to get 7 bags of dead-infected monkeys that died in Room H and Room F. Once at the Institute, Nancy and one of her colleagues were dissecting the monkeys in the Biosafety Level 4 Zone. Jerry Jaax and his team arrived first. Jerry was the first person to go in, with one of his colleagues Hines. As they tried to locate Room H, they suddenly saw two workers in the building. The workers weren’t supposed to be inside without a Tivek space suit, which was used for protection.
Nancy later arrived, and she goes inside with a space suit to Room H. She instantly saw that the monkeys showed signs of Ebola. A worker outside the monkey house with a space suit, was convulsing and vomiting blood. Dan thought that he was dying of Ebola. The two workers, the first monkey caretaker and the second worker mentioned before, weren’t infected with Ebola. The mission continued with all the volunteers from the Institute so that they could help with the mission. The volunteers accepted, and they became part of a dangerous mission that could cost them their lives.
Jerry’s team had injected the monkeys with high doses of ketamine to kill the monkeys. As the mission went on, a volunteer had a hole in her suit. The next day, while the team was still killing monkeys, a monkey escaped its cage and was loose. The volunteer who had a hole in her suit, named Rhonda, came face-to-face with the loose monkey and turned out fine. The monkey was caught and killed. Jahrling on the other hand, was working with monkey samples. He found out that he and Geisbert didn’t have Ebola. This finding resulted in an incident, in which Geisbert and Jahrling had whiffed the virus but didn’t know it was Ebola.
Back at the monkey house, the entire Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was sterilized and the mission was a success. The virus in the monkeys was Ebola but it was a different type of Ebola. The name Ebola Reston came from this mission. Many readers won’t realize the biology in this novel. The Hot Zone deals mostly with viruses. A virus is a parasite that is considered both a non-living and living organism. A virus is considered non-living because they rely on living organisms as their host in order to survive. They are also considered living because they can replicate in their host and make their host filled with their own cells.
When a virus enters a living organism they replicate quickly. When a virus doesn’t find a host, it doesn’t survive long. Ebola virus is a virus that is very deadly if infected with it. Ebola causes hemorrhages all over the host’s body and also causes the enlargement of the spleen, loss of consciousness, an expressionless face, and brain damage along with other symptoms. The end of The Hot Zone states the trip that Richard Preston himself made to Africa. Once in Africa, he made a trip to Kitum Cave, in which he was going to try to find Ebola’s location. He thought that maybe spiders were the host of Ebola.
The results of this experiment also resulted inconclusive. After a time in Africa, Richard went back to Reston, Virginia to visit the monkey house. He saw that the place was completely sterilized and destroyed. He never in his mind doubted that Ebola would strike again. Thanks to this book, scientists now know how to be more aware of how to handle unknown viruses. It also changed the way scientists do their research. The Ebola virus is able to return at any time, but since there are technology advances happening rapidly, scientists will be able to know how to handle the viruses better if they happen to come around again.