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

by Richard Preston

At some point, people just got it,” Lina Moses said, months later. The Kissi villagers in the Makona Triangle were the first to understand the truth: Ebola wasn’t a fiction or a plot by foreigners, it was a communicable disease. People in the Makona Triangle learned the signs and symptoms of the disease. They avoided contact with anybody who looked like they might have the disease. They stopped going to funerals. In addition, they began sending their loved ones to the Doctors’ camps. And eventually the same thing happened all over West Africa. “What they came to understand is that they cannot take care of the people they love,” Lina Moses continued. “They have to surrender their infant, their spouse, or their beloved grandmother to an isolation ward in order to save the rest of their household. I think I would have a really hard time doing that in the same situation. When the stakes are your life and the lives of your family members, you figure things out pretty fast.”