THE COBRA EVENT

The Cobra Event
By: Richard Preston

In the novel, The Cobra Event, by Richard Preston, the author engages the readers into a story about how a man tries to attack New York City using his deadly weapon, The Cobra Virus. The novel starts off with a seventeen years old teenage girl whom expects nothing out of the ordinary on a normal day of school. Little did she know that during art class her symptoms of what she thought was a typical cold would turn into symptoms of a deadly virus that has been unleashed in New York City. Due to the fact that the young girl was the second case of such symptoms, a homeless guy being the first case, Dr. Alice Austen had been called from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to New York City to investigate these cases. While doing the autopsy, Dr. Austen has found similar findings in the girl that have been found in the homeless guy, such as: blisters in her mouth and nose, pupils that looked as if they were inflamed, and a smooth swollen brain. From those symptoms Dr. Austen believes that a deadly virus might have been explanation for the death of these two people.

This story is about how Dr. Alice Austen, Dr. Mark Littleberry, and Will Hopkins Jr. go on a mission to try and find out where this virus is coming from and what it is. In the novel you discover that the virus was invented by a man trying to infect innocent people in the United States. The Virus that this man has invented is known as the Cobra virus. It is a virus that attacks the brain and is very lethal.

The book states that this novel is related to forensics science, the scientific study of physical evidence at a crime scene, because they used the evidence that they discovered to solve the many cases that involved the Cobra Virus. It also relates to science, because when a person is infected it starts off as a normal cold, then it attacks the central nervous system (the part of the nervous system that involves the brain and spinal cord), swelling the brain and allowing it to become very soft. In the seventeen years old girl, Kate Moran, before her death she went through a phase of actions such as: sweating, dizziness, running nose with clear mucus, biting her lips off, and so on. Later on during the autopsy Dr. Alice Austen discovered what effects these actions had in/on her body.

The autopsy was one of the most unusual autopsies that Dr. Alice Austen had performed. During the autopsy, she first checked her mouth and nose and discovered that there were a large amount of blisters, which would explain the nose bleed. Then she observed her eyes and concluded that they were yellowish with “flamelike offshoots”. She continued to observe different organs, taking pieces of them to send to labs. Then she reached the brain, and when she first observed the brain she was astonished at how swelled up and soft it was. The brain’s folds, as the novel puts it, were smashed into the dura mater and its wrinkles had disappeared. Usually a brain’s folds are very sharp and deep.

I believe that this book’s scenarios are very likely, because for this novel, Richard Preston’s sources included people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, such as a FBI scientist; so it is likely that such an event may occur in life. It may also be likely because in society many people are capable of inventing a lethal virus to threaten the government, or even people they are unpleased with.

If an outbreak, such as the one in the novel, were to become reality, it would affect our society because a deadly lethal virus would result in the deaths of many people. A virus would become a threat to the United States, because it would spread quickly and damage society. Lastly, another way it would affect our society is because it would create enemies and war. Enemies and war would occur because innocent people would either have been killed or in harm’s way, because of a person who decided to create a lethal biological weapon, The Cobra Virus.