The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

Richard Preston's timing could not have been better. In August 1994, only a few weeks before his new book appeared in bookstores, alarming national newspaper headlines informed the public of a scientist becoming infected with the exotic Sabia arenavirus after a laboratory centrifuge accident at the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit. Following the scientist's relatively rapid recovery under ribavirin therapy, public discussion continued concerning whether a widespread outbreak of an exotic virus could be adequately controlled by current contingency procedures. The Sabia crisis, after all, was not the first of its kind, not even for the Yale arbovirus labs. John G. Fuller's 1974 book Fever! The Hunt for a New Killer Virus describes how two Yale researchers became infected while working with another deadly arenavirus, Lassa, in 1969; one of them died as a result. Enter The Hot Zone, New Yorker writer Richard Preston's crash course for the lay reader about the hemorrhagic fever viruses Marburg and Ebola. These are related viruses of the filovirus family, which originate from central Africa and have been implicated in outbreaks with exceptionally high mortality in the 1970s and 80s. The first part of the book relates some of these incidents, beginning by reconstructing the story of a Frenchman who appears to have somehow contracted Marburg while exploring an enormous jungle cavern in Kenya known as Kitum Cave. Preston goes on to describe the devastating outbreaks of Ebola in hospitals in Zaire and Sudan, attributable primarily to the re-use of contaminated needles. In these first chapters, and indeed throughout the book, the author's focus is far less on microbiology and pathogenesis than on the gruesome final clinical manifestations of filovirus infections. The language is more reminiscent of Stephen King than of Berton Roueche: "The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one's tongue." And so on. Still, Preston does share Roueche's concern for epidemiological investigation, relating, for instance, how Kitum Cave was implicated and investigated as a source of Marburg after a second victim, a Danish boy, was revealed to have been touring the cavern shortly before his death. The second and longer part of the book focuses on a specific filovirus scare that occurred not in Africa, but in Reston, Virginia. In early October of 1989, a group of about 100 monkeys …