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Argumentative Essay On The Hot Zone

Decent Essays

Richard Preston, the author of The Hot Zone, wanted us to believe two things. The first is that the viruses explained throughout the novel, such as Marburg and Ebola, are nature’s defense against the “infectious parasite” that the human race is on this planet. He emphasizes that the horrible viruses are the earth’s way of punishing the human race for taking over and for preventing their future expansion. The second thing he wanted us to believe is the idea that the Ebola virus could spread very rapidly if it’s airborne. In today’s society, with the use of airplanes, it’s very easy for viruses such as Ebola which are airborne to spread all over the world, and “feed” on a variety of hosts around the world. In the novel, many of the outbreaks …show more content…

At the ending of the novel, when Preston enter the Kitum cave, he describes how some powerful and ancient is embedded within the cave. He says that nature itself is unknowable and unstoppable. To sum it up, Preston believes that nature may use the line of Ebola as a kind of a cure to combat the destructive human race. With the power of nature as a broad piece of evidence, it backs up the part of the thesis that Ebola can destroy the world. Another highly accurate argument throughout this book is that the spread of the viruses such as HIV or Ebola are due to human error. Since these viruses are spread through direct contact of bodily fluids, whenever humans have sexual intercourse, eat contaminated meat, build highways like the one near Kitum Cave as pathways for epidemics, and use infected needles in multiple people, they are actually exposing themselves to devastating diseases that had no cure and instantly meant death for most people. Since Preston decides to focus on a small and peaceful town in the middle of Virginia that got infected by dangerous diseases, he is proving how fragile everyday life really is, and how a town can be wiped out with one person being exposed to one deadly disease. In the novel, even though most of the scientists took precautions such as wearing space suits and gloves, they learned that even these precautions isn’t a foolproof way of stopping these infections. The

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