There is no other novel that is more horrifying than Richard Preston's outstanding book The Hot Zone. The Hot Zone was published in the 1980's and was New York's number 1 best-seller. This book describes the path of a killer virus that breaks out in Africa and begins to kill humans in the process. No one knows where the virus is coming from and where its exact origin is. The book is divided into four parts, which are Part One: The Shadow of Mount Elgon, Part Two: The Monkey House, Part Three: Smashdown and lastly Part Four: Kitum Cave. Each of these parts has a different case of people who were affected with the Marbug and Ebola virus over the course of its route, and the ways scientists try to locate and test the virus. Most people were infected with Ebola. Ebola is a lethal filovirus, which kills people in approximately two weeks, and considered asymptomatic for a period of time. Ebola kills 90% of its victims. Asymptomatic is when there are no symptoms present for a disease. The first case of a person infected with Marbug was in the 1980’s near New Year’s Day. Marbug has three sisters, which are Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, and Ebola Reston. Let me start writing about this horrifying, but true story.
The book starts off with Part One: The Shadow of Mount Elgon. This part states the first case of Marbug and Ebola case, and how scientists at an Institute examine and test the virus to find out how it affects the human body. The first case infected with Marbug was a man named Charles Monet. His case wasn’t identified until later on. 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, which could’ve been or was bat poop. Once he sees this he touches the guano and eventually gets sick. What Monet didn’t know was that he was infected with Marbug. Monet arrives at Nairobi Hospital very sick, and sits in the waiting room. When Monet’s vomit lands on the floor, he immediately gets admitted into the emergency room and is attended by Dr. Musoke. Dr. Musoke in seeing Monet sees that his eyeballs made no movement and were dilated. 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 Marbug would take Dr. Musoke as its host, and become its next victim. The same symptoms took place on Dr. Musoke; back pain, fatigue, red eyes etc. Dr. Musoke tried to diagnose himself but he couldn’t. 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.
Meanwhile, in Maryland, a veterinarian named Nancy Jaax was working to become part of the Ebola Project. Nancy is a veterinarian of the U.S. Army. She worked at the USAMRIID Institute. The Ebola project was a project started by a scientist named Anthony Johnson. 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 “ That was when I knew that Ebola could travel through the air”.
In 1976, there was 2 more identifiable cases in Zaire and one in Sudan. One case was of a man named Mr. Yu. G. who became infected by handling Ebola-infected cadavers. The second case was of a schoolteacher who became infected by cross-contaminated injections. Lastly, the third case in Sudan resulted in a nun named M.E. who had been quarantined because she was infected. This is where the name of Ebola Sudan came from. The consistent outbreak in Zaire went into further investigation by CDC doctors. A CDC doctor named Frederick A. Murphy was the first to identify the structure of the virus. Another scientist named Eugene Johnson did an experiment to try to stop the virus that broke out in Zaire and Sudan. The Ebola virus disappeared for a while, only to reappear some time later. In 1987, there was a case of a 10 year-old Danish boy named Peter, who resulted positive for Marbug. Eugene Johnson, found out from the child’s parents via from the help of Dr. Tukei, that Peter had been in Kitum Cave. Kitum Cave to recall, was where Charles Monet became infected. Johnson conducted another experiment in 1988, in which he went to Kitum Cave. There he used all animals in the cave to try to figure out if any of them could be the virus’s host. The results of the experiment were inconclusive.
The next section of the book is Part Two: The Monkey House. In Reston, Virginia, 100 crab-eating monkeys were imported from the Philippines to the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit, or simply known as the monkey house. The veterinarian in charge of the unit was Dan Dalgard. Over the course of three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys started to die. The manager of the monkey house named Bill Volt, brought up the monkey deaths to the attention of Dan. 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 at USAMRIID named Tom Geisbert was the person to examine the dead monkeys’ liver cells with an electron microscope. He finds that the liver cells were destroyed by “worms”. He also finds that the cells were loaded with “bricks” of virus particles that were ready to explode, and decided to take some pictures of his findings. Geisbert showed his findings to Peter Jahrling and Colonel C.J. Peters, who is the chief of disease-assessment division at the Institute. 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. Jahrling told his results to the General Philip K. Russell, the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command. 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. The results of the dissection concluded that the monkeys not having Ebola. The discovery of a rare virus in Washington D.C. meant a huge concern for the Army.
The Army didn’t want to get the CDC involved in the situation because the situation of the virus would bring a lot of arguments. The Army and the CDC had a conference that after many arguments and disagreements the Ebola-biocontainment mission was split in two. So the CDC’s part in the mission was to work with human-health aspects, and care for any human patients infected with Ebola. The Army’s part was to handle the monkey’s and the monkey house at the Reston Primate Quarantine. After the conference, some action was taken to decide to decide as for who would be part of the monkey house team. Jerry Jaax, Nancy’s husband was in charge of creating a plan and a team when the time came to enter the monkey house. Eugene Johnson, worked with Jerry on the plan. Part of the plan would be to use the equipment Johnson used at Kitum Cave before. A couple of days later, Colonel C.J. Peters, the chief in charge of the Reston biohazard mission, got permission to go inside the monkey house. As all that happened, Johnson was inside the monkey house creating a setting just like the lab of the Institute. So there would be like a Level 1, Level 2, the gray zone, and the decontamination zone. The mission was to completely kill all 350 monkeys and sterilize the entire building.
The next part is Part Three: Smashdown. This part creates the suspense of the book. The mission was going to be exhausting. Some part of the Army arrived at the monkey house. 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.
The last section of the book is Part Four: Kitum Cave. This part 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.
This book relates to biology in one way. 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 its 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, brain damage along with other symptoms.
The book itself changed the way scientists do research and handle viruses in society today. In today’s society scientists and researchers are more aware of how to handle unknown viruses. The Ebola virus can return at any time, but because science and technology are advancing every day, they will have a better knowledge as to how to handle the virus if it were to strike again. Take for example the AIDS virus. When the virus first struck, it did damage, but then it subsided for a while. Scientists didn’t know how to treat the virus, and also didn’t have the knowledge on what to do. The virus subsided for a while. Now as time passed, the virus returned and this time it is affecting every part of the world. AIDS is a disease that no one can escape if infected because there is no cure. This book changed society because since Ebola virus killed many people before and it disappeared a while ago, we can’t take any chances anymore if Ebola were to strike again. It would be devastating to the human population.
The Hot Zone was a great book. It was very interesting with a lot of suspense. The book was filled with detail of a deadly virus that arrived at the U.S., lucky the U.S. that no one was infected with the virus, or it would’ve been deadly.
The book starts off with Part One: The Shadow of Mount Elgon. This part states the first case of Marbug and Ebola case, and how scientists at an Institute examine and test the virus to find out how it affects the human body. The first case infected with Marbug was a man named Charles Monet. His case wasn’t identified until later on. 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, which could’ve been or was bat poop. Once he sees this he touches the guano and eventually gets sick. What Monet didn’t know was that he was infected with Marbug. Monet arrives at Nairobi Hospital very sick, and sits in the waiting room. When Monet’s vomit lands on the floor, he immediately gets admitted into the emergency room and is attended by Dr. Musoke. Dr. Musoke in seeing Monet sees that his eyeballs made no movement and were dilated. 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 Marbug would take Dr. Musoke as its host, and become its next victim. The same symptoms took place on Dr. Musoke; back pain, fatigue, red eyes etc. Dr. Musoke tried to diagnose himself but he couldn’t. 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.
Meanwhile, in Maryland, a veterinarian named Nancy Jaax was working to become part of the Ebola Project. Nancy is a veterinarian of the U.S. Army. She worked at the USAMRIID Institute. The Ebola project was a project started by a scientist named Anthony Johnson. 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 “ That was when I knew that Ebola could travel through the air”.
In 1976, there was 2 more identifiable cases in Zaire and one in Sudan. One case was of a man named Mr. Yu. G. who became infected by handling Ebola-infected cadavers. The second case was of a schoolteacher who became infected by cross-contaminated injections. Lastly, the third case in Sudan resulted in a nun named M.E. who had been quarantined because she was infected. This is where the name of Ebola Sudan came from. The consistent outbreak in Zaire went into further investigation by CDC doctors. A CDC doctor named Frederick A. Murphy was the first to identify the structure of the virus. Another scientist named Eugene Johnson did an experiment to try to stop the virus that broke out in Zaire and Sudan. The Ebola virus disappeared for a while, only to reappear some time later. In 1987, there was a case of a 10 year-old Danish boy named Peter, who resulted positive for Marbug. Eugene Johnson, found out from the child’s parents via from the help of Dr. Tukei, that Peter had been in Kitum Cave. Kitum Cave to recall, was where Charles Monet became infected. Johnson conducted another experiment in 1988, in which he went to Kitum Cave. There he used all animals in the cave to try to figure out if any of them could be the virus’s host. The results of the experiment were inconclusive.
The next section of the book is Part Two: The Monkey House. In Reston, Virginia, 100 crab-eating monkeys were imported from the Philippines to the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit, or simply known as the monkey house. The veterinarian in charge of the unit was Dan Dalgard. Over the course of three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys started to die. The manager of the monkey house named Bill Volt, brought up the monkey deaths to the attention of Dan. 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 at USAMRIID named Tom Geisbert was the person to examine the dead monkeys’ liver cells with an electron microscope. He finds that the liver cells were destroyed by “worms”. He also finds that the cells were loaded with “bricks” of virus particles that were ready to explode, and decided to take some pictures of his findings. Geisbert showed his findings to Peter Jahrling and Colonel C.J. Peters, who is the chief of disease-assessment division at the Institute. 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. Jahrling told his results to the General Philip K. Russell, the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command. 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. The results of the dissection concluded that the monkeys not having Ebola. The discovery of a rare virus in Washington D.C. meant a huge concern for the Army.
The Army didn’t want to get the CDC involved in the situation because the situation of the virus would bring a lot of arguments. The Army and the CDC had a conference that after many arguments and disagreements the Ebola-biocontainment mission was split in two. So the CDC’s part in the mission was to work with human-health aspects, and care for any human patients infected with Ebola. The Army’s part was to handle the monkey’s and the monkey house at the Reston Primate Quarantine. After the conference, some action was taken to decide to decide as for who would be part of the monkey house team. Jerry Jaax, Nancy’s husband was in charge of creating a plan and a team when the time came to enter the monkey house. Eugene Johnson, worked with Jerry on the plan. Part of the plan would be to use the equipment Johnson used at Kitum Cave before. A couple of days later, Colonel C.J. Peters, the chief in charge of the Reston biohazard mission, got permission to go inside the monkey house. As all that happened, Johnson was inside the monkey house creating a setting just like the lab of the Institute. So there would be like a Level 1, Level 2, the gray zone, and the decontamination zone. The mission was to completely kill all 350 monkeys and sterilize the entire building.
The next part is Part Three: Smashdown. This part creates the suspense of the book. The mission was going to be exhausting. Some part of the Army arrived at the monkey house. 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.
The last section of the book is Part Four: Kitum Cave. This part 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.
This book relates to biology in one way. 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 its 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, brain damage along with other symptoms.
The book itself changed the way scientists do research and handle viruses in society today. In today’s society scientists and researchers are more aware of how to handle unknown viruses. The Ebola virus can return at any time, but because science and technology are advancing every day, they will have a better knowledge as to how to handle the virus if it were to strike again. Take for example the AIDS virus. When the virus first struck, it did damage, but then it subsided for a while. Scientists didn’t know how to treat the virus, and also didn’t have the knowledge on what to do. The virus subsided for a while. Now as time passed, the virus returned and this time it is affecting every part of the world. AIDS is a disease that no one can escape if infected because there is no cure. This book changed society because since Ebola virus killed many people before and it disappeared a while ago, we can’t take any chances anymore if Ebola were to strike again. It would be devastating to the human population.
The Hot Zone was a great book. It was very interesting with a lot of suspense. The book was filled with detail of a deadly virus that arrived at the U.S., lucky the U.S. that no one was infected with the virus, or it would’ve been deadly.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.