Analysis Of The Hot Zone By Richard Preston

It’s probably not even threat, in America that is. It has the potential to wipe off humans. I first learned of Ebola in in my last year of middle school from a short documentary. The little information gained since then has sufficed but after reading The Hot Zone by Richard Preston my perception on the Ebola virus grew. Not only does Preston tells the tale of an Ebola outbreak in America, but his writing keeps tension throughout the book.
Preston opens with Charles Monet infected with Marburg. He goes into detail of the Ebola Zaire virus and the Ebola Sudan. Ebola was found in Nurse Mayinga’s blood by Eugene Johnson. As an outbreak in Bumba continues the C.D.C., Centers for Disease Control, travels to offer aid. They find the virus at its climax

Unlike those mentioned in The Hot Zone, I, as an average American citizen, can never relate to the experiences of having Marburg or Ebola. However, I can now visualize these experiences and understand the grave circumstances Americans went under and what the Central Africans had to endure. The Hot Zone depicts the onset of symptoms from Marburg and Ebola and the ease it can travel from one victim to the next. In the situation of Marburg, Charles Monet is infected and sitting on a twenty four hour flight while showing symptoms.(17,18 Preston) This is extremely eerie as monkeys had been infected with Ebola and Marburg just by breathing it.(224 Preston) This revealed to me that no one is exempt from stopping or catching a virus like Ebola.(226 Preston) I live in a society where we don’t have a virus affecting us like there is in Central Africa. This makes me more cautious of the things I would come into contact with such as sick people. It’s not as if that I would disown them if they were sick but I would take more measures to ensure that I wouldn’t catch their cold. Along with this I’ve been looking at the measures I take to ensure no one else would catch my cold or virus and that I can recover from it. Overall the book has widen my perception of viruses and infectious diseases. I don’t take the topic of Ebola or Marburg lightly

As Nancy Jaxx is inspecting a piece of flesh this description emulated with me, “In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.”(256 Preston) I’m prone to overanalyze thus I’m attracted to complex topics in biology. The Hot Zone made it clear what I wanted to pursue in life. The Hot Zone goes more in depth from what I learn as a high school student. Preston goes into detail of the work that the USAMIRIID and the CDC conduct. Isolating a virus, researching how a virus takes a host, the virus’ origins and creating tests to deterring if one has been infected is work that intrigues me. In another section of the book, Geisbert is examining the monkey virus, “Geisbert stared through the eyepieces of the microscope. He saw a complicated world in the flask. As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at.”(Preston 183) As I read The Hot Zone it took me in the tension and atmosphere of disease research and biology. I don’t think I will forget reading the Hot Zone because not only did it depict a perspective of biology rarely shown but it changed my views on literature that informs the audience of endemics and epidemics. I would stray far away from books