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The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus Mass Market Paperback – July 20, 1995

by Richard Preston (Author)

4.6 7,698 ratings

Book 1 of 4: Dark Biology Series

See all formats and editions

The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus.

Now a mini-series drama starring Julianna Margulies, Topher Grace, Liam Cunningham, James D'Arcy, and Noah Emmerich on National Geographic.

A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Preston's account of an outbreak of a strain of the Ebola virus among monkeys in a Virginia laboratory has spent more than 30 weeks on PW's bestseller list.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"One of the most horrifying things I've ever read. What a remarkable piece of work."
--Stephen King

"Popular science writing at its best and the year's most infectious page-turner."
--People

"A top-drawer horror story...the best literary roller coaster of the fall."
--Newsweek

From the Publisher

"One of the most horrifying things I've ever read. What a remarkable piece of work."
--Stephen King

"Popular science writing at its best and the year's most infectious page-turner."
--People

"A top-drawer horror story...the best literary roller coaster of the fall."
--Newsweek

From the Inside Flap

A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the
appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

About the Author

Richard Preston is the author of several books, most recently The Cobra Event. He is a regular contribuot to The New Yorker. He has also won the AAAS-Westinghouse Award and the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The headache begins, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New Year’s visit to Kitum cave-January 8, 1980-Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really didn’t know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with a brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.

When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what had happened to his eyes or his face or his mind. Thinking that he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.

The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he seemed able to travel by himself. He had money; he understood he had to get to Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.

A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day æParis, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.

The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with the dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights that drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern rift valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born. They say specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy rift clouds, and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.

The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes, and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is something wrong with him, but you can’t tell exactly what is happening.
He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up. Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, have expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows: his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the underlying bone, as if the face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance know as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The smell of the vomito negro fills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag is bulging and softening threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant.

When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone “extreme amplification.” This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim’s blood may contain a hundred million particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it is the black vomit.

He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting upæhis bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Monet has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live.

The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his noseæhe gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, clotless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won’t coagulate, and the towels soak through.

When a man is ill in an airline seat next to you, you may not want to embarrass him by calling attention to the problem. You say to yourself that this man will be all right. Maybe he doesn’t travel well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and people do get nosebleeds in airplanes, the air is so dry and thin. . . and you ask him, weakly, if there is anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles words you can’t understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on forever. Perhaps the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot virus have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an offer of help. They become hostile, and don’t want to be touched. They don’t want to speak.. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can’t seem to find words. They can tell you their name, but they can’t tell you the day of the week or explain what has happened to them.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; 1st edition (July 20, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385479565
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385479561
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1030L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.17 x 1.04 x 6.87 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #228,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42 in Virology
- #107 in Communicable Diseases (Books)
- #165 in Sociological Study of Medicine

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4.6 7,698 ratings

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Richard Preston

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Richard Preston is the bestselling author of The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, and the novel The Cobra Event. A writer for The New Yorker since 1985, Preston is the only nondoctor to have received the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention Award. He also holds an award from the American Institute of Physics. Preston lives outside of New York City.

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Listing Books

Scary, Well-Researched, Informative. Nightmarish.

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2015

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y Review and Thoughts:

This is truly a mind altering book that leaves you scared crap-less in so many horrifying, real life ways. This book showcases the brutal reality of this horrible virus that is more killer than anything else. This is the real life monster living somewhere out there ready to attack in waves of pure painful death that is graphic, disturbing and most of all a ravaging beast inside your own body.

This book left me breathless and utterly disturbed. This is possibly one of the best books ever written on a virus. Richard Preston gave a voice to this beast of destruction. He allows you to understand and grasp the horror of this virus. In vivid detail he recounts the moments of infection, key figures who came down with the virus. The exploration of this virus in all its horrifying, painful moments that lead victim after victim to death. A death that is both painful and described in this book in brutal means.

This book details total fear. This book showcases the truth of this virus in all its fascinating brutality. Dreadful in the thought that it lingers out there waiting.

I think what stands out with this book is Richard gives a human side to this horror. He allows those who put their lives on the line to be expressed throughout this reality of carnage, fear and the not known. From human fear to science and medical clarity, Richard expresses an honest undertaking that often leaves you the reader in a state of shock, and amazement that allows you to be a part of the procedure.

I felt as if I was there inside the blood drenched walls. I felt the breathing inside the respiratory mask, and sweated inside the protective bio-suits. I felt the squeals of the infected monkeys. I felt the darkness, and cringe inducing reality of the unexplored caves of Kitum Cave. I felt the pathway of the deadly pathogen as it slowly moved throughout the bodies of its ultimate victims. I felt as if I got to know brave hero’s like Nancy Jaax, Jerry Jaax, Tom Geisbert, Dan Dalgard, C.J. Peters, Gene Johnson, Peter Jarling, and all those others who fought against it, sought it out to understand it, and for those who expressed a bravery to face it head-on, which I could never do.

Utterly fascinating, shocking, brutal and filled with a massive dose of pure learning education on a scary as hell topic, and true monster.

Would I Return to it Again: Absolutely. I think this should be required reading for science or medical classes or even College History lessons. A wonderful exploration of this horrifying killer that you can’t even see coming.

Would I Recommend: In a heartbeat. This should be read and expressed in all its brutal understanding and exploration of this virus.

My Rating: 5 out of 5

Four Words: Scary, Well-Researched, Informative. Nightmarish.

I’ll leave you with this extraordinary statement from Richard Preston in the book:

Page 406-407

AIDS…. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston….

“In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not “like” the idea of five billion humans. Or it could also be said that the extreme amplification of the human race, which has occurred only in the past hundred years or so, has suddenly produced a very large quantity of meat, which is sitting everywhere in the biosphere and may not be able to defend itself against a life form that might want to consume it. Nature has interesting ways of balancing itself. The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has reorganized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite.”

Originally posted on my webpage: http://www.classicbookreading.com/2015/09/richard-prestons-hot-zone-terrifying.html

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Tom Paine

Everything you wanted to know about Ebola.

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2014

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Everything about Ebola from about twenty years ago and why pretty much nothing has changed.

A good read. A terrifying one. A must read. Written over 20 years ago, this book was prophetic in some ways and details the work of the people at ground zero of the Ebola outbreaks in East Africa in the 1970s, the outbreak in Reston Virginia, and clarifies, for me, the dichotomy between how the primary researchers working on Ebola at USARIID at Ft. Dietrich, Maryland would like us to respond to an outbreak and how the CDC refuses to take such extreme measures as is necessary to prevent this agent from becoming epidemic in the US.

The cultures of the two organizations come from two different experiential circumstances. You'll have to read the book to truly understand that our government's response to the threat presented by this virus is being led by political people with a medical background (indeed, Tom Friedan has't renewed his medical license but he's director of the CDC), not medical people who are in uniform or working for politicians. Dr. Fauci is primarily responsible for the HIV/AIDS "epidemic" in the 1980s by not insisting CDC's guidelines to close the bathhouses and glory holes allowed its rapid spread through the homosexual community coast to coast. He seems to be applying the same politically correct attitudes and platitudes to Ebola today, placing our country - and the world - at risk of great peril.

A truly remarkable book, this reads well, quickly, with a minimum of medical/scientific "jargon" (there's a glossary in the back).

I found reading it again, 20 years after I first did, with many more years' exposure and experience in CBRNE, Medical community response to catastrophic events, medical planning for same, infectious disease medicine and direct exposure to "political medicine" working in government healthcare in the National Capitol Area, Preston perfectly exposes and encapsulates the aforementioned dichotomy and political enmity between CDC and military medicine.

Last Spring, WHO was aware of Ebola breaking out in West Africa and, by their own admission, dropped the ball.

CDC's Friedan tells us "we'll control this outbreak like we did every other one in the past twenty years", except this one, and he said that after five countries had outbreaks and individuals in Spain, the US and a few other countries tested positive or were already in quarrantine.

Doctors without borders has had over half their medical staff infected. 16 our of 29 physicians have died. Fully ten percent of all healthcare workers involved in the outbreak have been infected.

If Ebola is SO hard to catch, why are so many people catching it?

The agencies are withholding information.

CDC tried blaming the nurses when CDC/WHO PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) protocols failed.

Ebola IS airborne (it's in the book - this has been known for decades), it persists (lives) on surfaces for days if not weeks (as do MANY other enteroviruses) and yes, you CAN get it from an asymptomatic patient (Polio, another enterovirus, is documented as shedding from upwards of 90% of infected, asymptomatic, individuals).

There is SO much "wrong" with our government's response to the Ebola outbreaks, the roots of much of it can be seen in how Preston details the interactions between CDC and military medical experts.

It's too bad this was never made into the movie it should have been.

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Duncan Crumley

The best book I’ve ever read

Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2024

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This book is INCREDIBLE. I am in no way a strong” reader I bought this book to try and bring down my screen time and that it did. This book is better than any horror movie I’ve watched. There were times that I had to stop because I was holding my breath and I didn’t realize. 10/10 will recommend to anyone who is in earshot.

Mariana González Rivera

Estupendo

Reviewed in Mexico on September 28, 2021

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Lo compré usando y aunque es viejito está en muy buenas condiciones. Definitivamente lo volvería a comprar.

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Abiola O.

great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 27, 2023

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Great book with awesome descriptions of the 4 sister Marburg, Ebola Sudan,Ebola Zaire and Ebola reston.if you have plans on join in the military in a health sector read this book.

Anne Topley

Horrifying

Reviewed in Italy on February 1, 2021

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The real low-down on how close the human race can be to extinction.

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LBR

E -Boladona!

Reviewed in Brazil on June 18, 2019

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