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

by Richard Preston

The swarm has no emotions, no desires, no fear, no love, no hate, no pity, no plans, no such thing as hope. Yet, like all forms of life, each particle in the swarm possesses an unalterable biological will to copy itself and perpetuate its genetic code through time.

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.

Human beings had to become like monsters in order to save their human selves.

Trapped in the host they had killed, unable to reach a new host, vast numbers of particles died along with the ruined host. By the end of 2014, Ebola was fading away. In the Makona Triangle it was virtually gone.

As the Ebola epidemic died down, the NIH started testing the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine for Ebola, and it showed solid effectiveness. At this writing, the vaccine is being tested in eastern Congo, where Ebola virus has broken out and is running wild—and no doubt evolving in human bodies.

As the tide of the Makona strain receded, it left its dead scattered across eight countries, including Spain and the United States. Thirty thousand people had been infected. More than eleven thousand people had died of the virus, and untold thousands more had died because they couldn’t get medical care during the epidemic, since hospitals were devastated. Seven percent of all the doctors in Sierra Leone were dead. The medical infrastructure of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone had been wrecked. The three nations’ economies had functionally collapsed. At Kenema Government Hospital, at least thirty-seven nurses were dead. Two Kenema hospital doctors were also dead—Humarr Khan and Sahr Rogers. In the end, the Ancient Rule prevailed, and the emerging virus temporarily went back to its hiding place in the virosphere.

Yes, she told Luban, this Ebola was the fish with the sharpest teeth, the real killer in the swarm. And it was different from the other Ebolas by only one letter in its 18,959 letters of code. The change in one letter had caused a slight change in one of the proteins of Ebola.

Maybe he had seen how close the world came to something much worse than ten thousand deaths and three nations wrecked.

The Makona strain understands people better than does any other kind of Ebola.

The virus, a true monster, followed the bonds of fealty and love that joined the hospital’s caregivers to one another and ultimately to every other person on earth.

The African medical professionals gave their lives trying to rescue one another, and, at the same time, they served as a thin, dissolving line of sacrifice in which they stood between the virus and you and me.

The Ebola epidemic seems to be part of a pattern rather than something unusual or extreme. When looked at closely, it was really just a series of small accidents and unnoticed events, which, moment by moment, grew into a crescendo of horror.