The Hot Zone: The origins of Ebola

You may have heard about the Ebola virus. If so, you know the ultimate horrors it can do to the human mind, and worse of all, the body. Imagine feeling sick one day. You don't feel well, so you take an asprin. Next day, you cough up your blood in black vomit. Then, you become zombie-like, not being able to think like a person. Then, you crash and bleed. That's when you bleed out all your blood either inside, or you bleed out on the outside. (Outside of your body) It also kills 95% of its victims. Now imagine this virus with the fact that it is incredibly contagious. Now it sounds like it can, and will, if it gets the chance, wipe out humans. Well, The Hot Zone describes how close it came to doing just that.

     The Hot Zone, written by Richard Preston captures the secrets of the deadly Ebola viruses, and their sister  virus Marburg. The book starts out describing The Marburg virus, a virus that makes people bleed out from under their skin, and cough up black bloody vomit. Disgusting but fascinating. It may sound hard to make that fascinating, but Richard Preston does it. The next part is about the Ebola Zaire virus, it has similar symptoms of the Marburg virus, but it kills more people. After Ebola Zaire is discovered officially, the attention switches from what it is to curing it. Sadly, there was no cure. After that, Ebola came the closest to killing off millions of humans. It was discovered outside of Washington D.C. in a monkey house, a business that supplies test monkeys from foreign countries. And you never know what happens in foreign countries. Obviously, nobody is very happy. The Army puts up countermeasures, and after much strife, the Virus is gone, receded into hiding, waiting to strike.

Biohazard team removing something possibly deadly from a hot zone.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and best (Or possibly worst) of all, it is all a true story! The endings to each chapter left me on the edge of my seat, yet it also included a lot of valuable information which is the best thing I will take away from it. The writing was good, but it jumped around too much to seem perfectly flowing. I enjoyed this book because of the facts and the way the author ended the chapters. The fluidity is something that made me somewhat confused as a reader, but nothing bad.

Wikipedia page for "The Hot Zone"
The authors website