This Ebola book is more terrifying than fiction

A pregnant woman, infected with Ebola, bleeds out on the table. An aide reaches her bare hands inside the woman to deliver the stillborn baby, unaware that the virus has now invaded her body, too.

And this is just the beginning. Richard Preston’s terrifying “Crisis in the Red Zone” reads like a zombie apocalyptic thriller but is the nonfiction follow-up to his runaway 1994 bestseller “The Hot Zone,” about the origins of the Ebola virus.

“Crisis in the Red Zone” chronicles the viral outbreak in 2013 and 2014 that started in equatorial Africa and ravaged field hospitals in places like Sierra Leone. Preston isn’t squeamish, and he expects his readers to be similarly strong-stomached. “There was something demonic about the illness,” he writes. “Their faces went blank, they hiccupped, they had nosebleeds, they become demented, and then, as the disease progressed, they expelled black blood from the anus.”

These words aren’t typically found in most beach reads, yet the book is impossible to put down. At its height, the Ebola virus was “roughly as contagious as the seasonal flu” but exponentially more life-threatening — over 11,000 people died in 21 months. Some epidemiologists estimated if not contained in time over a million people would have been sickened.

Thankfully this nightmare ends happily — a cure in the form of a “killer antibody” treatment called ZMapp, developed in the United States, can reverse the illness in a matter of hours, but costs $100,000 per dose. This, combined with safer containment procedures (in some hospitals just using a black garbage bag over clothing and skin reduced transmission) helped manage the crisis.

But this week, as the World Health Organization upgraded an Ebola outbreak in the Congo to a public health emergency of international concern, you have to ask yourself: Have we really won the war against this terrible disease?
Try to enjoy your summer.

Source: Read Full Article