When I mentioned the descriptions in Preston’s book, Rollin mockingly said, “They melt, splash on the wall,” and gave a frustrated shrug. Mr. Preston could write what he pleased, Rollin added, so long as the product was labeled fiction. “But if you say it’s a true story, you have to speak to the true story, and he didn’t. Because it was much more exciting to have blood everywhere and scaring everywhere.” A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but “they don’t explode, and they don’t melt.” In fact, he said, the often-used term “Ebola hemorrhagic fever” is itself a misnomer for Ebola
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