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

by Richard Preston

a disease that had never been described by doctors and didn’t have a name.

Covid

a medical professional, cut down in the course of her work at the hospital. She was a casualty in the field of medicine,

Ebola can destroy a person’s immune system in seven to ten days. HIV requires years to wipe out a person’s immune system.

The code is contained in nucleotide bases, or letters, of the RNA.

Ebola is roughly as contagious as seasonal flu.

he might have tasted a raw or undercooked bat, or he might have played with a groggy bat, or he might have gotten some bat blood or bat urine in his eyes or in a cut in his skin.

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.

Ebola had a long record of killing medical workers.

while her elderly mother and her sister cared for her.

evil force

Personalize virus

Menindor the healer was now very sick, lying in bed in her house.

Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human. The virus exploits the best parts of human nature as a means of travel from one person to the next. In this sense the virus is a true monster. —

and the virus moved to the caregivers, traveling along chains of duty and affection.

Menindor’s husband had also died, they said. He had opened his wife’s bag, or chest, and had seen the snake inside it. Her husband saw the snake and that was why he had died. And then a little boy had died. The reason for the boy’s death was that Menindor had prepared a magic flagstone and placed it in the lintel of the door to her house. Menindor’s magic stone had been removed from the doorway and this had caused the boy to die, they said.

By the third week of May, the outbreak seemed essentially over. During the entire time of the outbreak, there had been a total of 258 cases of diagnosed or probable Ebola in West Africa. Zaire Ebola was acting just the way it had acted in all previous outbreaks: a couple of hundred people get Ebola, and the virus goes away, suppressed by the Ebola fighters. The World Health Organization prepared to announce the end of the outbreak; the announcement was planned to come at the end of May. Doctors Without Borders made plans to start closing their Ebola treatment units and bringing their staff home.

The

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There were fifteen Ebola patients in the cubicles along the narrow corridor. Fletcher could see that the nurses were under pressure. “They were a pretty frightened, tired group,” he recalled later. Khan told Fletcher that some of the Ebola nurses had been skipping work. They were afraid of catching the virus, and their family members had been pressuring them to stay home so they wouldn’t infect their families. Patients were prostrate, and they were vomiting and having diarrhea. The nurses were giving them fluids to drink, but the patients vomited them up, which caused the patients to become severely dehydrated. As this happens, the level of potassium in the bloodstream decreases drastically. An imbalance of potassium in the blood can trigger a heart attack.

Days went by. Khan suited up and rounded the red zone, and he and Fletcher worked together. Every evening, the two doctors ate dinner at a hotel, drank a beer, planned action, and returned at night to continue working. Fletcher’s respect for Khan grew. They became friends. Meanwhile more and more Ebola patients kept arriving, including children. Auntie kept bringing in more cots, until the ward got so jammed with cots that it became difficult to move around. Patients were dying in the beds and in the cots, and the nurses were putting the bodies into biohazard body bags and removing them. Then there was the problem of food. The patients, especially children, needed to eat, if they could hold down food. Khan and Fletcher worked on providing a steady supply of food to the ward.

At

When

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The growing Ebola swarm could be thought of as a huge, invisible biological pachinko machine with a quintillion balls bouncing in it;

THE ANCIENT RULE

Week 2

He could see, and feel, the cadaveral blood running over his fingers and dripping from his wrist.

Quesfion 1

There was a hole in the night. The sounds of nature were full and complete. What was missing was the sound of drums.

2

Jean-François Ruppol, after urging the people to do the hardest things, telling them to turn cold hearts on the sick and frail, went and did the opposite, and lost his head over a baby.

3

After a human body got “impregnated” with a few particles of Ebola, about ten days later the impregnated body would give birth to a ghoulish flood of Ebola particles, spurting, gushing, and oozing out of every pore and hole in the body.

4

The virus was everywhere around her, on every surface, every bed, every person, every wall.

5

It was now about twenty-four hours since Lisa Hensley had been shifting boxes with Brantly inside a closed storeroom and talking with him, their faces inches apart. NIGHTFALL

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.