The Hot Zone

In the first two chapter of part one of The Hot Zone started of about the day to day life of Charles Monet, and how it got sick leading up to his death and Doctor Musoke get sick after Monet's vomit got in his eye and mouth. The author gives a brief overview of what Monet's live was Luke after he returned from his trip with his lady friend and got sick, then died. While doing the author posed questions as to why and how Monet got so sick that fast. The author was trying to show the reader that even something sliding your hand over a surface or in something can possibly make you sick. The author's purpose for writing these two chapters was to show how quickly a life can change and can have a domino effect. As Monet's life went from going to

Chapter 1 of Part 3 titled, “Insertion”, in The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Jerry Jaax wakes up in the morning and gets ready. All of his team wore civilian clothing, because wearing space suits would panic the media. He leaves the house and arrives at the Institute. Whole crowds of people were waiting at the side of the building. He spotted Gene Johnson, he was pacing back and forth across the loading dock. There were many camouflage military trunks that contained Johnson’s gear from Kitum Cave. A white van pulled up and Johnson loaded his equipment into it. This van was headed to Reston. By now, The Washington Post newspaper had a headline on their paper saying that a deadly Ebola virus was found at the monkey house. Top-level workers were

The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, is a non-fiction story about the deadly virus (Ebola) spreading throughout the world. Certain strains of this virus are 90% fatal, and cause horrible symptoms, such as facial drooping, muscle aches, reddened eyes, and puking. The Ebola virus was traced back to a man named Charles Monet. After Monet, the virus spread rapidly, and it was leaving no survivors.

The Hot Zone creates a sense of both vivdness and danger. Author Richard Preston creates an environment that draws the reader into his narrative, making us aware of the “non-fiction” aspect of the book and the consequences its contents might have on our own lives.

Viruses, Plagues, and History, written by Michael Oldstone, is an insightful and highly educational book that details the history of, that’s right, viruses and plagues. Through typically dry, yet engaging prose, Oldstone recounts what seems like all of it while simultaneously bringing to light the contributions of those brave scientists who asked themselves, “why.” He focuses his attention on some of the most notable viruses such as smallpox, yellow fever, measles, polio, and later he focuses on more contemporary battles against disease.

fast as HIV. "Ebola does in ten days what it takes HIV ten years to accomplish,"

In the early 1900’s medicine was making some steps closer into some great improvements for health and better understanding of the human body. Doctors with sufficient knowledge of the human body and cures for diseases and viruses were scarce. People were much more concerned with government and politics, than health and medicine, until one of the greatest and most grotesque lethal pandemics that’s struck the earth in human history. This pandemic the “Spanish Flu” spread so rapidly and had an extremely high mortality rate. This was caused by the close contact of humans and poor cleanliness and sanitation, and the host (virus) and the body taking harsh action

AUTHOR: Richard Preston PUBLISHER: Random House DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1994 Setting: The setting g takes place in two major places. Reston Maryland which is a suburb of Washington DC. and the second major area is in Kenya Africa.

The disease developed in humans through blood-to-blood contact, which occurred in hunters from rural villages found within the Congo Basin. The hunters most likely came into contact during the hunting and butchering of chimpanzees and other monkeys, which carried the SIV virus. At first the disease wasn’t a threat to humans because for one not a lot of people were being infected, and secondly the immune system would have been able to fight the SIV virus. However, over time with more cross-species transmission, the virus would replicate and through different mutations, it would evolve. Eventually, there would be a mutation in the virus, which would allow the virus to successfully attack a human immune system. This scene explained that since not many were effected to begin with, and because to begin with it wasn’t threatening, that when it became dangerous it didn’t grow at an alarming rate like it would in Haiti in the future. I believe this scene is very efficient at explaining how the virus can adapt so that it would be able to effect the human population like it has to someone who has little knowledge of how viruses work between species. Also I think it is an effective scene, because people are often a lot more sympathetic to animals, and the deaths of animals, so I think that this scene would stick in their brain a lot more than other scenes even if they were just as, or even more

In his book, The Hot Zone, Richard Preston focuses on an outbreak of the Ebola virus in Reston, Virginia and in multiple places in Africa. To show how dangerous an outbreak can be, Preston examines, in great detail, various other viral outbreaks, including Marburg. Preston begins by talking about a fifty-six year old Frenchman named Charles Monet who ends up breaking out with a treacherous disease called Marburg. This wasn’t known until his doctor, Dr. Shem Musoke, ended up testing positive for Marburg after Monet`s infected blood went all over Doctor Musoke as Monet was dying. Musoke survived his outbreak with Marburg.

In The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, the three major themes repeatedly emphasized are predator versus prey, sacrifice, and going against the odds. The book uses the struggle to contain and exterminate the filoviruses to convey these three ideas. It treats the filoviruses as a predator, and the humans as the prey. It enforces this idea over and over again by using animalistic qualities to describe the humans and the filoviruses, giving them both the same amount of consciousness and personality. “The Ebola Zaire strain was nearly twice as lethal as Ebola Sudan. It seemed to emerge out of the stillness of an implacable force brooding on an inscrutable intention.” Constantly, the scientists, veterinarians, and doctors do everything they can

It was a challenge for researchers to find a cure because of how new these strands were, and there was also pressure to find these cures soon due to how fast this virus could have, and in some cases did, move through populations. Shortly after his expedition to Kitum Cave, Gene Johnson says this quote from Louis Pasteur, a 19th century microbiologist, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This quotation applied to the situation because those who knew how to handle this virus ended up being far more successful than those with no experience. Therefore, the author aims to point out that those who treated the virus with ignorance had created danger by approaching their situations with carelessness, which ultimately leads to

​The origin of the disease has been described at the end of the movie where we find out that a bat with a virus known as paramyxovirus that infects a pig. The pigs that are for human consumption were located near a forest that was being cut down. The pig in turn infects human beings of the earth through a chef. The agent which is very infectious is known as MEV-1 and its potential spread is estimated at 6-7 which suggests that the virus is highly transmissible from one person to the next. The virus has been compared to that of a smallpox virus with a mortality rate of up to 30%.

From the sequence scientists were able to determine that virus probably began its life in an animal then mutated before picking up the power to infect people.

Although doctors were supposed to be considered medical experts, they were not taken seriously due to the fact that a patient had less than a fifty percent chance of benefiting from a doctor’s visit (“The 1920s: Medicine and Health: Overview”, n.p.). Doctors struggled to diagnose and fix medical problems due to inexperience and lack of tools (“The 1920s: Medicine and Health: Overview”, n.p.). As a result of the substandard medical community, maternal deaths and child deaths were commonplace, while simple sicknesses often turned into fatal infections (“The 1920s: Medicine and Health: Overview”, n.p.). When the first wave of the influenza pandemic struck in the spring of 1918, the medical community was taken aback by the pandemic’s unpredicted wrath (Peters, 13). The typically mellow influenza virus, characterized by familiar symptoms of fever, headache, fatigue, cough, sore throat, congestion, and body aches, claimed victims within hours (Peters, ix, 1-5). This was a sickness like no other, and it left the medical community baffled. Doctors nor medical experts knew what the sickness was, why it was spreading, what was causing it, or how to fix it (Peters, 1-5). All branches of the medical field practically shut down: researchers found no potential