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The Ebola Virus In The Hot Zone By Richard Preston

499 Words2 Pages

In The Hot Zone, Richard Preston discusses the major topic of 2015: the Ebola virus.
It all began in a small cave in Kenya called “Kitum” cave. What many did not realize was that this cave would change the world.

Ebola, despite being discovered in the 1970s, was still mysterious at the time of this big outbreak. The symptoms of Ebola includes internal and external bleeding, vomiting blood, Headache, difficulty breathing, and lack of appetite. Because we had no knowledge and preparation on Ebola, the virus was spread between others in a massive scale. At one point during the outbreak, a deadly strain of Ebola hit Zaire, erupting simultaneously in some 50 villages, killed nine out of ten people it infected. Zaire's president, Mobutu Sese Seko, called out his army to seal the Kinshasa hospital and the entire zone of infected villages, with orders to shoot anyone trying to come out. As Preston describes it, "It did not know boundaries. It did not know what humans are; or perhaps you could say that it knew only too well what humans are: it knew that humans are meat." The Hot Zone also used characters such as Nancy, Charles Monet, and others. But what was the point of this? The use of character in this book is what made this book even more gruesome and devastating. Preston …show more content…

As the story progress, a monkey house in Washington D.C was experiencing something unusual. Specifically in room F, monkeys were dying everyday. After a further investigation, they discover the deadly hot agent present throughout the building. Preston uses precise details to describe the horrifying scene of the monkey house and this effectively demonstrated what this deadly virus is capable of.
At the beginning of the book, Preston states that this book is nonfiction; but how come it is categorized as “fiction”? This is because Preston casted this story as a scientific thriller rather than a boring science textbook describing the Ebola

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