The Hot Zone Essay, Research Paper

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 story takes place in the 1980’s.

Main Characters: Since this story is a true story there is no

one character that is a main character. The author does not

create the story around any one main character so I’ll just list

every character I can remember from the book. 1. Charles

Monet: He was the first host to the deadly ebola virus

breakout in Africa. He was 56 years old and was kind of a

loner according to the authors interviews with people. 2. Dr.

Mosoke: He was Charles Monets doctor when Charles

crashed and bled out which means when the host suddenly

starts bleeding infectious blood out of every orifice in the

body. 3. Nancy Jaax: She was a veterinary pathologist at a

military fort in Maryland.. 4. Jerry Jaax: He was a

veterinarian and husband to Nancy Jaax. 5. Peter Jahrling:

He was a disease expert at Fort Detrick 6. Gene Johnson:

He was in charge of the Reston operation. He also was the

discoverer of Ebola Sudan. 7. Nun: The Nun’s name was

unknown but she had the very first recorded case of Ebola

Zaire which is the most dangerous of the three strains.

Summary: This is a true story. On New Year’s Day 1980 a

man named Charles Monet went on a trip with a girl friend

of his up to Mnt. Elgon in West Kenya. They spent the night

there and went to a large cave there called Kitcum cave.

After his trip to Kitcum cave he went home and three days

later had a huge headache that wouldn’t go away. That is the

first symptom of this deadly disease. A few days later he

went to the doctors and they told him he should go to a

bigger hospital in Nairobi. Charles caught a flight to Nairobi

an the ninth day after his visit to kitcum cave. All through the

flight to Nairobi he was throwing up blood mixed with a

black liquid. When he got to the hospital he sat down and

waited to be served. Then his spine went limp and nerveless

and he lost all sense of balance. he started going into shock.

He then started throwing up an incredible amount of blood

from his stomach and spilt it on to the floor. The people who

were there said the only sound was the choking in his throat

from his constant vomiting while he is unconscious. Then

came the sound of bed sheets being torn in half which is the

sound of his bowels opening up and venting blood from the

anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. His gut is

sloughed. The linings of his intestines come off and were

being expelled from his body along with huge amounts of

blood. This dying process which happens to nine out of ten

people who come in contact with the deadly disease is

called crashing and bleeding. Samples of his blood were

flown to all the major disease labs in the world. The disease

was a Marburg Strain. In Sudan the same types of deaths

were wiping out whole tribes. So Gene Johnson flew over

there and worked with sick members of the tribes to try and

find a cure. This strain of Marburg was called Ebola Sudan

for were it was found. Later in Zaire there was an out post

of missionaries who would give vaccine shots and penicillin

to local tribes. One of the nuns there became sick with a

similar disease. She died and her blood was sent to disease

labs all over the world. The strain was called Ebola Zaire

since it was discovered in Zaire. In Reston Maryland there

was a monkey house that would ship monkeys all over the

US. to labs for medical experiments. Suddenly all the

monkeys started dying in one room. Tom Jahrling from fort

Detrick came down and took a look at the monkeys and

took some samples. He took back and he and Tom

Geisbert looked at it and thought it was just a small monkey

virus and try smelled it which is a way to tell what something

was. They couldn’t tell what it was so they looked at it under

a electron microscope and it looked allot like Marburg.

They were scared because they had smelled the container of

the marburg. They didn’t tell anyone that they had been

exposed. The Military and the C.D.C. (Center for Disease

Control) sealed off the whole building and Nancy Jaax and

Jerry Jaax led squads of people inside the building wearing

space suits. Two people while working inside the building

were cut and their space suits were torn which means they

were exposed to the virus. They found out that the virus they

were working with was a close relative to Ebola Zaire. They

killed all the monkeys in the building and locks their corpses

up because they were predicting that if the virus got out it

would total the human population. It would be like another

Black Plague, but the Black Plague only killed 50% of those

infected while this killed 90%. They put a special chemical in

the building and let it sit four three days. After the tree days

nothing was alive in the entire building not even a tiny

microscopic virus could live. But four people had been

exposed to the virus and surprisingly they all lived they later

realized that the virus must have mutated so it would not

harm humans but if it mutated again and could effect humans

it would be devastating. This new virus was called Ebola

Reston. OPINION: I thought the book was really scary. It

was scary to see that there are diseases that could

completely wipe us out and that we got really lucky at

Reston. I thought the book was also very educating. From a

scale of one to ten I give it a ten because the author uses

great detail. for instance when the author tells the effects of

the disease.