The Cobra Event by Richard Preston

The Cobra Event starts off with a 17 year old girl named Kate Moran living in New York. Kate is just a healthy and normal girl until one day she wakes up with what she thinks is a common cold. As the day goes on she gets worse and worse. She is sitting in art class and suddenly falls on to the floor. Kate tells her teacher, Peter Talides, that she feels like she is going to throw up so some of her classmates help her to the bathroom. At this point she has a horrible runny nose and blood blisters in her mouth. She fell on to the floor and started seizing. It only go worse from there. Her body would stiffen and she would kick and jerk uncontrollably. Kate started biting her lip until it fell of and dangled from the side of her mouth. She then started eating it and the inside of her mouth. Then something really strange happened. Her bodies arched into the air like a giant C. Her teacher Peter Talides tried to preform CPR but it was clearly too late. This was just one of the many cases that bewildered Alice Austen, a worker at the CDC or the Center for Disease and Control. She was flown to New York and that's where everything started. She helped lead the autopsy for Kate Moran and was confused. Some things struck Austen as strange like the gold rim around the iris in her eyes, blood blisters in her mouth, the kidneys because they were gold and streaky instead of a reddish brown color, and the fact that there was a lot of uric acid in her blood. Alice also found it odd that her brain was swollen and colored weird. The brain was completely destroyed. They had two cases of this unknown cause of death which they believed to be because of an unknown biological weapon. Austen decides to stay in New York because of the newer cases. In the end of the book there were a total of 32 people who were infected with this disease known as Cobra. They called it the Cobra because of the Cobra boxes that were found with some of the victims. It turns out that the box contained the virus and it eventually spread. The Cobra was a combination of the nuclear polyhedrosis virus, the rhinovirus, and smallpox. Austen joined forces with Will Hopkins, Mark Littleberry and many others to try and stop this madness. They finally caught the culprit after a dramatic chase underneath the city and in the subway. The culprit was Thomas Cope, a bitter former employee of a company. He died of his own disease which is good , he got what was coming for him.

This book relates to science because of all the autopsy's and science behind the discovering of the Cobra disease. It was very strange to the pathologists, or scientists who study diseases, and other scientists on what was happening to these people and why. They found out that the Cobra disease had the affect of brain damage that caused Lesch-Nyhan. With Lesch-Nyhan it would cause children and people to injure themselves like biting their lips off. An example of that would be Kate Moran. She uncontrollably bit herself. Scientists also injected the virus into mice to see if it would live. Before they knew anything the women working on the mice, Suzanne Tanaka, got bitten in her finger. She knew that there was a 10 to 20 second time limit where you could cut off your finger with a clean scalpel to save your life. "She held the scalpel clumsily with her left hand, poised to slash it down on her finger. And didn't do it. Couldn't. This is crazy, she told herself. I don't want to lose my finger. And then the twenty seconds had passed, and the choice was no longer hers to make" (Preston 285). It turns out in the end that the mice were infected with the disease. They started self-cannibalization just like the human victims. It was too late for Tanaka. It took a while for her symptoms to occur and when they did there was no cure yet, they were still looking for one.

The scenarios in this book are very likely to occur. There are a ton of weird people in the world who are just angry and hate life. Those are the kind of people that would do something like this. Thomas Cope was smart. He had a job where he could access all of the knowledge he needed to pull the Cobra event off. It is very likely that someone could do that and almost get away with it to. It was a chain reaction kind of disease. Kate was infected by buying the box with the cobra in it, her teacher got the disease by trying to save her life with CPR, even a one of the autopsy men Glynn Dudley got affected just by standing where Peter Talides fell and his infected insides splattered on to his glasses. A chain reaction like that from the book could definitely happen in real life especially in a very popular spot like New York City. New York is really busy and people pass by and bump into each other all the time. Just by this simple contact they could be infected. If this book became a reality it would affect our society in a horrible way. If this happened for real an even bigger chain reaction would probably occur. If this was to start off in New York it could potentially spread all over the country or even world. There are so many tourists that visit New York. If some of these people were to get infected with the disease than return home back to their state a ton of people in the new state will be infected and it will just keep going on until eventually everyone has the horrible disease. Even if everyone was cured the rats still got infected. I don't think rats really bite people but there is always a possibility that they'll bite you or maybe they'll bite your pet and then your pet bites you. See? No matter how you look at it there's always a way that you could get the Cobra disease. Although there are many diseases out in the world today luckily this book is fiction so you don't have to worry about the Cobra disease.