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

by Richard Preston

By one recent count, an Ebola particle has 18,959 letters of code in its genome. This is a small genome, by the measure of living things. The human genome, for example, has around 3.2 billion letters of DNA code, and the loblolly pine has 22 billion letters of code.

When she started working at USAMRIID, Hensley had no knowledge of space suits and no interest in working in a hot zone; she planned to do research on a mild virus that causes common colds, especially in children. This kind of cold virus infects many kinds of wild animals. Hensley thought that one of the wild cold viruses could jump out of an animal into a person somewhere on earth and start a global outbreak of a fatal, emerging cold.

Lisa Hensley branched out into research on other emerging viruses. Her targets included Sars virus and Mers virus, which are lethal Biosafety Level 3 agents that circulate in animals and can invade people—and in fact these viruses are the animal cold viruses that Hensley feared, and they do cause extremely lethal cold-like illnesses in humans.

“I always think that the absence of bad luck is the most important thing in life,” Piot said.

“This is how all outbreaks end,” Armand Sprecher, the Doctors’ official in Brussels, said. “It’s always a change in behavior. Ebola outbreaks end when people decide they’re going to end.”