“We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”
Richard Preston’s 1994 non-fiction book The Hot Zone: A
Terrifying True Story covers the outbreaks of Ebola in Africa (a deadly virus)
and the virus' alarming outbreak at a monkey-house in Reston, Virginia in 1989. Named as
Ebola Reston, the new virus strain found in a US laboratory was eerily similar to
Ebola Zaire, which was first reported in Congo in 1977 (and from 2014 has
ravaged across West and Central Africa killing thousands of people). Unlike the other pernicious Ebola viruses, the Reston virus caused only asymptomatic infections and couldn't
cause disease in humans. The Hot Zone was often praised for its gripping
narrative, which at times reads like a chilling horror literature. Of course,
since it’s a twenty-five year old book, some of its portions are clearly
outdated. Epidemiologists have also found problems with Preston’s amplified
writing style and the way he supposedly twists the true nature of Ebola to keep
the readers ‘terrified’, keeping up with the promise presented in the book title (the book was
adapted into a six-part miniseries this year by Nat Geo channel).
The first two chapters of The Hot Zone are brilliantly
written; the visceral account of what Ebola does to human body was so
disturbing and scary to read. Although some of Preston’s choice of words to
describe the people dying of Ebola (‘liquefy’, ‘bleeding out’) were criticized
to have stoked sensationalism and unfounded fears (about the disease), the
riveting prose keeps us wholly engrossed (provided you don’t take Preston’s
description as the only clinically accurate version). The Hot Zone was written at a time when
the general public had no knowledge of Ebola virus (even the scientific
community was then coming into grips about the emerging, extremely deadly
viruses) and some of the big fears addressed here were allayed over the years
(like Ebola was ‘possibly airborne’).
At the same time, the
criticisms laid out against Preston’s book, for instance that it totally
exaggerated the dangerous of Ebola in humans, were found to be misconception
after the 2014-2016 West African Outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people. The
current Ebola epidemic in Central Africa (particularly in Congo) that was first
declared on August 1, 2018 has resulted in 1,700 deaths and counting. The
vaccination and treatment efforts of the selfless doctors in Africa are also
thwarted by the military conflicts in the region and the continent's lesser-developed healthcare
system.
The Hot Zone has the undeniable quality of creeping us out (“Ebola
Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle
and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part
of the body into a digested slime of virus particles”). Although the origin of Ebola virus is still a mystery, Preston kicks up the scare factor by focusing a
lot on the Kitum cave (in Mount Elgon National Park, Kenya). The author’s
description of the place makes it seem preternatural, where invisible,
primitive enemies are waiting to wreak havoc on the entire human race. Even
Preston’s own journey into Kitum cave doesn’t reveal anything about Ebola.
Similar to the vivid chronicle of Ebola symptoms in Charles Monet and Nurse
Mayinga, the peek inside Kitum cave simply contains the power to terrify the readers,
but adds nothing much from a scientific perspective.
Preston brings a much-needed interesting subtext into his ‘thrilling’
narrative late in the book, when he talks of deforestation of tropical rain
forests and the aftermath of AIDS epidemic. “In a sense, the Earth is mounting
an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the
human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the
concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the
United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and
spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps
the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans”, writes Preston,
contextualizing how the rapidly enlarging host of deadly viruses is linked to
human’s adversarial impact on environment.
Having finished The Hot Zone, I have now started to read David
Quammen’s 2014 book ‘Ebola: the Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus’,
which is said to be toned down and less dramatic than Preston’s book. Also, I am
interested in reading Richard Preston’s updated follow-up to his 1994 book, Crisis in
the Red Zone (published July 2019).
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