The Hot Zone, Richard Preston (ISBN 978-0552171649, Transworld Publishers)

A true story about an outbreak of an Ebola ‘variant’ in the US, Reston virus near Washington DC. The book has been criticised for sensationalizing the physical effects of Ebola and Marburg with people bleeding out and decomposing and turning into a bag of liquid. That is the graphical image you get from the cases of Ebola and Marburg described in this book in Africa and the of the Monkeys infected with Reston in the US. The book came out in 1994 and was a non fiction best seller that caused quite a stir. It certainly brought the potential danger of viruses to the attention of the public as the vivid description of the effects of Ebola and Marburg were certainly scary enough. Personally I liked this book best as a companion read to Spillover as it has little detail about our understanding of these viruses but it does add a couple of cases and some more human interest background on certain researchers from USAMRID. What it does well is highlight our limited understanding of how these filoviruses work. This becomes really clear in the section where the great similarity and Reston is discussed. Somehow that small change results in Reston not making humans sick, only monkeys. But even if you don’t turn into a bag of liquid, the fact that we don’t understand Ebola, that it disappears and then pops up again and we don’t know in which host it hides is scary enough. It is like a predator that you know is out there waiting to pounce. And if it hits you you have a 90% chance that you won’t survive. So far Ebola didn’t cause a pandemic because of luck possibly and because it has killed its victims too fast to allow the infection to spread to a lot of others. Maybe we are just waiting for the mutation that will hit the bullseye of the right balance between mortality and infection to cause an Ebola pandemic. Humans live in a global network nowadays with fast traveling across the globe. All it takes is an infected person with a sufficiently transmissive virus to reach a big city to start the next pandemic. Liquid bag or not this is scary enough if the survival rate of the infected is only 10%.