In 1980 a man named Charles Monet went on a trip with a girlfriend up to Mountain Elgon in West Kenya. They spent the night there and went to a large cave called Kitcum cave. Three days after his return home, Charles began to have a headache. A few days later he went to the doctors and they told him he should go to a bigger/better hospital in Nairobi. So Charles flew to Nairobi.
During the flight to Nairobi Charles found himself vomiting blood with a black liquid. Charles finally reached the hospital only to wait. While he was waiting and he lost all sense of balance. Charles started to go into shock. He started to throw up even more blood. The people who were there said the only sound was the choking in his throat from his constant vomiting. Then the horrid sound of his bowels opening up was also heard by the witnesses. Blood mixed with his intestinal lining then leaked out of his body. This was a 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 identified as Marburg Strain. In Sudan the same type of virus was wiping out whole tribes. So Gene Johnson (the one in charge of the Reston operation, and discoverer of Ebola Sudan) flew over there and worked with the sick members of the tribes to try and find a cure. This strain of Marburg was called Ebola Sudan because of where it was found. Later on in Zaire, missionaries would give vaccine shots and penicillin to local tribes to help reduce the number of outbreaks. One of the nuns whose name was unknown there became sick with a similar disease. She had the very first recorded case of Ebola Zaire which is the most dangerous of the three strains. She died and her blood was sent to disease labs all over the world as well. 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 United States to labs for medical experiments. Suddenly the monkeys started dying. Peter JahlringHe was a disease expert at Fort Detrick from fort Detrick came and took a look at the monkeys and took some blood samples. Jahlring and Tom Geisbert then looked the samples, thinking it was just a monkey virus and accidentally exposed themselves to the virus. They looked at it un...
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...tely be a very large panic. The virus would also spread so quickly and do so much damage in a very short period of time. The virus would basically wipe out our population if it weren’t contained/controlled properly.
The book presented this problem, with the virus being dormant for a while, and then starting to contaminate a population. The book also has the virus being spread within a lab holding monkeys (used for experiments) that was located in the United States. This creates fear in the reader’s mind, because one would think it is just a matter of time before the virus gets out into the “real” world. The book deals with the problem by locking up the lab and getting rid of the virus by placing chemicals into the building with the monkeys. Because this is a true story, I believe that this would be the most logical solution to the problem.
Overall, I felt this was a very interesting book to read. It was able to keep my attention and kept me from putting the book down. Some of the parts seemed to be a little graphic and were gross. I would recommend this book to anyone who wanted to read a good true story about viruses.
This virus is similar to Ebola, because it started in the same place. Lab workers in Germany, in 1967, contracted the new virus while working with African Green Monkeys, which had the virus. The virus is described as a hemorrhagic fever. It has a fatality rate up to 90% and spreads through human to human contact. The first symptoms can be as simple as a fever and a headache, then can progress to organ failure, and fatal internal bleeding.
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 mode of transmission was both direct and indirect. Africa strain was direct contact; Sam thought it was direct because when his team took off their masks nothing happened also the villages who did survive didn’t get infected (Petersen, 1995). We found out later there are two different types of virus strains due to the patient who was isolated in hospital getting the disease through the vents which made it airborne. The virus had to mutate in order to survive in another environment like Cedar Creek which created that second strain but only the monkey carries both strains of the virus.
“I was so sick I could hardly get along and an old Indian carried my child on his back. We went up a cliff that had cedar bushes to pull up by. The bushes gave way and I rolled down I don’t know how far and injured my nose. It bled all over my clothes. I was fatigued. I thought I would never get there. By this time, my dress was covered with blood and my face and hands besmeared all over.”
... find small traces of the virus, and predicted that at one point in time would make an escape to the human population.
Mr. Wright had a generalized far advanced malignancy involving the lymph nodes, lymphosarcoma. The patient had tried every available form of medicine and his condition had hopelessly deteriorated to the point where he was bedridden and gasping for air. [The doctors] agreed that he had only a few days to live. Then the man heard about an experimental drug called Krebiozen, which was in the process of being tested. He insisted on being included in the experimental trials. His doctors, feeling he had nothing to lose and would soon be dead anyway, out of compassion greed to give him the experimental drug. To their amazement, the man's tumors soon began to shrink dramatically and he was discharged from the hospital. Two months later, the man read news accounts of the research on Krebiozen that reported serious doubts with the drug. Within a matter of days, the man's tumors had returned and were again threatening his life. His doctor cleverly convinced him that a new and more potent shipment had been received and proceeded to give him injections of plain water. His tumors once again began to shrink dramatically. He remained healthy for seven more months until another news report declared 'Nationwide AMA Tests Show Krebiozen to Be Worthless as a Cancer Treatment.' The man died within two days (4).
Imagine walking into a tiny village in Africa, suffering and dying from some unknown virus. As you approach the huts you hear the wails of pure agony from the afflicted tribe members. Coming closer, you smell the stench of vomit mixed with the bitter smell of warm blood. People inside lay dying in pools of their own vital fluids, coughing and vomiting up their own liquefied internal organs; their faces emotionless masks loosely hanging from their skulls, the connective tissue and collagen in their bodies turned to mush. Their skin bubbled up into a sea of tiny white blisters and spontaneous rips occurring at the slightest touch, pouring blood that refuses to coagulate. Hemmorging and massive clotting underneath the skin causing black and blue bruises all over the body. Their mouths bleeding around their teeth from hemorrhaging saliva glands and the sloughing off of their own tongues, throat lining, and wind pipe, crying tears of pure blood from hemorrhaging tear ducts and the disintegration of the eyeball lining and bleeding from every opening on the body. You see the blood spattered room and pools of black vomit, expelled during the epileptic convulsions that accompany the last stages of death. Their hearts have bled into themselves, heart muscles softened and hemorrhaging , the brain clogged with dead blood cells (sludging of the brain), the liver bulging and yellow with deep cracks and the spleen a single hard blood clot. Babies with bloody noses born with red eyes lay dead from spontaneous abortions of affected mothers. It is the human slate-wiper, the invisible ultimate death, the filovirus named Ebola.
The book then begins to tell about the “Reston facility.” In the building, hundreds of monkeys are infected with a new form of the Ebola virus discovered by veterinarian Nancy Jaax. With a new viral threat the US government moves to euthanize the monkeys and collect blood samples for testing. After several mishaps, all of the monkeys are successfully killed and everyone avoids infection; however, the situation builds a sense of urgency in the book and reader to understand the nature of the violent power of nature. The book ends in Kenya with the author visiting the spot where the first two Marburg victims contracted the virus. Throughout the novel it becomes evident that no matter how well-studied we think we are on a certain virus, there will always be an adaptation or a new virus that puzzles even the most intelligent scientists. It speaks to how limited we are in understanding the true power of nature. The book also shows how driven we are by fear. The constant threat of exposure and infection drives researchers to understand and combat
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is a viral disease that was first recorded in 1976, when an outbreak occurred in Yambuku, Zaire, a country that was latter renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (Walsh, Biek & Real, 2005). During the outbreak 318 cases were recorded of which 280 (88%) died. Later the same year, an outbreak occurred in Sudan where 284 cases were recorded with fatality rate of 53%. The disease and the virus that cause it are named after River Ebola that passes though Yambuku. In the USA, Ebola killed several monkeys in Reston, Virginia in 1989 (Barton, 2006; CDC, 2000). Despite several other outbreaks, the disease has neither medically approved pre-exposure nor post-exposure interventions. However, ongoing research shows optimistic signs.
Influenza, an innocent little virus that annually comes and goes, has always been a part of people’s lives. Knowing this, one would not believe that it has caused not one, not two, but three pandemics and is on its way to causing a fourth! The Spanish flu of 1918, the Asian flu of 1957, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968 each killed millions of people worldwide, causing mass terror. People were mad with fear, and for good reason, as friends, family, neighbors dropped dead like flies. And yet, as soon as the deaths ceased, the forgetfulness set in… until very few know about these pandemics. These pieces of history may have faded from memory, but with the upcoming threat of an avian flu which can jump from human to human, people must learn from the past to combat the future.
The book jumps to a distressing story about Peter Los in 1970 in West Germany who became ill due to smallpox. After ten days he was hospitalized but medical staff did not realize he had smallpox, which is highly contagious. Preston gives vivid descriptions of the disease and how it ravages the body. Los survived his illness, but caused an epidemic that killed many others that had become exposed to him. “Today, the people who plan for a smallpox emergency can’t get the image of the Meschede hospital out of their minds.
... perspective is applied, the outcome could be positive by preventing the spread of the disease in America, or negative, causing a worldwide pandemic. The deontological perspective straight up shoots down the mandatory quarantine because it takes away the individuals rights. The most compelling theory is the deontology theory, it completely under minds the argument in support of the quarantine, and could in effect the rights of Americans in the future. A better solution than a 21 day mandatory quarantine would be to request the humanitarians to do regular self-examinations and try to have little as possible contact for the first eight to ten days back from West Africa. This is the average time it takes for the virus to manifest itself. After that self-examinations should still be done until he 21 period is over, but minimal contact is not necessary.
With the zombie metaphor referring to uncontrollable fears in today’s modern society, the thriller is a realistic speculation about an airborne virus entering the human species and spreading on a global scale. With influenza outbreaks being a familiar scenario within modern society, the fear of an uncontrollable disease sends shockwaves of fear through the human race, especially when a vaccine has yet to be found and distributed, like in the film. The fear of a viral infection spreading stems from the idea that people do not simply “give” another individual the virus; a virus is a form of life that evolves and mutates in order to survive environmental changes. This virus searches for a new vulnerable host in order to survive and carry the disease to the next victim. The critical aspect around the spread of a virus is how drastically the reproduction process occurs. Without being controlled, the contamination throughout any species causes the spread to take place in a toxic way, “On day one, there were two people. And then, four and then, sixteen. In three months, it’s a billion. That’s where we’re heading” (Dr. Erin Mears, Contagion). Though the zombie metaphor focuses primarily on fear involving unconscious contributors and their mission of adding to their population, the fear of governmental control and how society responds to the epidemic is also an issue that needs to be considered. In this scenario, the viral
It is over in a matter of days. The victim staggers, disoriented and exhausted, and collapses in a fever. His eyes turn bright red, and he starts vomiting blood. Within a matter of hours, he "crashes" and "bleeds out" surcumming to agonizing death with blood seeping from his eyes, ears and other orifices. At autopsy, pathologists discover, aghast, that the patients internal organs have disintegrated into an indistinguishable mass of bloodied tissue. The killer: A "hot" virus, a highly contagious and deadly microbe that has never been seen before, and has no known cure. (Bib5, CQ Researcher, 495)
The employee who sold the monkey was infected by the water the monkey spit into his mouth. The pet shop owner got infected by a scratch he received from the monkey. When the monkey arrived to the pet shop he shared a banana with another monkey who also became infected. The employee and pet shop owner both become infected and then spread the disease by contact with others in their environment. The microorganism initially started as being contracted by contact but the mode of transmission graduates to airborne. The incubation period was at first 2-3 days but then once airborne it became 24 hours until you reached