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

by Richard Preston

When Lisa Hensley was a junior in college, studying public health at Johns Hopkins University, she began thinking about the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. The most recent evidence suggests that the most common type of HIV made a cross-species jump out of one chimpanzee into one person around 1910 in southeastern Cameroon, along a tributary of the Congo River. From that first human host, HIV began spreading from person to person, amplifying itself in the human species until it reached every community on earth. As of this writing, some seventy million people have been infected with HIV and thirty-five million have died of AIDS.