The Hot Zone Essay

“The Hot Zone,” by Richard Preston, is a thriller true story that explains an incident in a suburb outside of Washington D.C. in 1989. The book focuses on four Biohazard level 4 viruses: Marburg, Ebola Sudan, Ebola Zaire, and Ebola Reston. In the beginning we are introduced to some background cases, such as Charles Monet and Dr. Shem Musoke. As the book goes on we learn about how a strain of the Ebola virus broke out at a monkey facility, outside of the nation’s capital, in Reston, Virginia. The Army and the C.D.C. worked together to contain the situation and was later known that this form of Ebola was not harmful to humans. The overall theme of the book is never underestimate the power of nature because it is filled with great mystery and

I understood that the animals in the monkey house had to be put down in fear of a nation outbreak but the large number of animals that were used in Kitum Cave did not. The text states that “All of the sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the other animals, insects, birds…showed no signs of Marburg virus;” this goes to show that killing those innocent animals was not as necessary as they initially thought. I do agree that some animals are needed for scientific research but there should only be a certain amount allowed to prevent innocent animal

This book is based off of a killer virus that has the potential to harm me and many others that I care about. I think this book relates to anything, whether it be your family, community, or faith because many doctors and scientist that were stated in the text worked hard and risked their lives in order to know more about this unknown virus and are working for some form of treatment. This is important to me because then the government will know what to do if an Ebola virus emerges throughout the country and if our science has evolved by then, then we will know how to treat it in order to minimize the casualties. At the end of the book, Preston says, “Ebola had risen in these rooms, flashed its colors, fed, and subsided into the forest. It will be back” (411). This further explains that Ebola had already come once and there is a very big possibility that come