Ebola is very infective, but it’s transmitted through bodily fluids-chiefly blood, feces, vomit, and sweat. The last two are airborne and highly contagious. Still, I’d rather sit in a small room with an Ebola patient than with someone suffering from flu or (if I weren’t immunized) measles. I am never without a small bottle of hand sanitizer.
I’m the kind of person who frets for days if he shakes hands with someone who has a cold. I read The Hot Zone when it came out in mass-market paperback, and it noped the bejesus out of me.
The corpses of those whom Ebola kills do not dissolve they are carried to their graves by grieving relatives or space-suited medical workers, as Preston himself documents in his more responsible account of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come (his penchant for overheated subtitles remains strong, now with a superfluous comma as a bonus). Oh, and “you may weep blood”-it’s “where medical reporting,” Quammen quips, “meets Edgar Allan Poe.”Įbola is gruesome enough without this hyperbole. Indeed, science writer and New Yorker contributor Richard Preston introduced The Hot Zone-his best-selling 1994 account of “The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus,” as the breathless subtitle has it-with an epigraph from the Book of Revelation: “The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man.” To ensure no one missed the point, Preston attributed the line to “Apocalypse,” another title for Revelation (the Greek apokalypsis simply means “unveiling” or “revelation”).īowls of blood! According to The Hot Zone, Ebola virus disease liquefies the organs of the infected: “People were dissolving in their beds.” The virus “transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles.” One imagines patients’ garments floating in puddles of goo, as in the third season of Stranger Things. Every new infectious disease is a mystery, of course, but the dramatic efficiency with which Ebola kills-it is highly lethal and infective, causes hemorrhagic fever, and has a brief incubation window-lends it an apocalyptic aura. Ebola “begins as a mystery story,” as the science writer David Quammen puts it in his excellent 2014 primer Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus, which expands on a chapter from Spillover, his enchanting study of zoonotic diseases.
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