Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

by Richard Preston

The network of human connection, going hot with a virus, extended into the cities of West Africa. The funeral of Menindor appears to have been a central, germinal event in what would become a full-scale epidemic of Ebola in the human species, the most destructive, fast-moving expansion of any lethal infectious agent during the past hundred years.

The evidence is that the people of Bumba Zone stopped the virus themselves. This happened after they knew how to identify the disease and understood how it was transmitted from person to person. Doctors Ruppol, Raffier, and Buassa played a key role in giving people this information during their earlier visit to Bumba. These things were very, very hard to do. The Ancient Rule went against a normal person’s instincts to protect and care for loved ones. The virus was implacable, and people had to become implacable in order to defeat it. They had to restrain themselves from giving care to sick people. They had to cut themselves off from contact with any person who looked like they might possibly have the disease. They had to stop their traditional expressions of grief for loved ones who died.

The Ebola war wasn’t won with modern medicine. It was a medieval war, and it went down as a brutal engagement between ordinary people and a life form that was trying to use the human body as a means of survival through deep time. In order to win this war against an inhuman enemy, people had to make themselves inhuman. They had to suppress their deepest feelings and instincts, tear down the bonds of love and feeling, isolate themselves from or isolate those they loved the most. Human beings had to become like monsters in order to save their human selves.

Dressed this way, Fatu Kekula set up IV lines for her family members, giving them saline solution to keep them from becoming dehydrated. Her parents and sister survived; her cousin died. And she herself remained uninfected. Local medical workers called Fatu Kekula’s measures the Trash Bag Method. All you needed were garbage bags, a raincoat, and no small amount of love and courage. Medical workers taught the Trash Bag Method, or variants of it, to people who couldn’t get to hospitals.