The Hot Zone: Part One

HRV is a highly lethal but not very infective Biosafety Level 2 agent.

He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag.

It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse.

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.

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.

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.

The black vomit blew up around the scope and out of Monet’s mouth. Black-and-red fluid spewed into the air, showering down over Dr. Musoke.

It splattered over his white coat and down his chest, marking him with strings of red slime dappled with dark flecks.

He had lost so much blood that he was becoming dehydrated.

There wasn’t enough blood left to maintain circulation, so his heartbeat was very sluggish, and his blood pressure was dropping toward zero.

He needed a blood transfusion.

They opened him up for an autopsy and found that his kidneys were destroyed and that his liver was destroyed.

It was yellow, and parts of it had liquefied—it looked like the liver of a cadaver.

It was as if Monet had become a corpse before his death.

Sloughing of the gut, in which the intestinal lining comes off, is another effect that is ordinarily seen in a corpse that is several days old.

Lacking words, categories, or language to describe what had happened, they called it, finally, a case of “fulminating liver failure.”

Then he developed abdominal pain, and that made him think that he might have typhoid fever, so he gave himself a course of antibiotic pills, but that had no effect on his illness.

When Peter came to me, he was febrile, but he was very with it, very alert and communicative.

The pain in his stomach and in his muscles grew unbearable, and he developed jaundice.

She examined him, observed his fever, his red eyes, his jaundice, his abdominal pain, and came up with nothing definite, but wondered if he had gallstones or a liver abscess.

They made an incision over his liver and pulled back the abdominal muscles.

They cut a wedge out of his liver—a liver biopsy—and dropped the wedge into a bottle of pickling fluid and closed up Musoke as quickly as they could.

The fact that the team apparently never spoke with him, the monkey inspector, “was bad epidemiology but good politics,” he remarked to me.

Epidemiologists have since discovered that the northwestern shore of Lake Victoria was one of the initial epicenters of AIDS.

She was a wizened old lady, come to have a look around her old place, and she fixed a blue eye on Nancy and said, “Little girl, you are going to hate this house. I did.”

Gene Johnson had suffered recurrent nightmares about Ebola virus ever since he began to work with it.

Some of its effects resemble rabies—psychosis, madness. Other of its effects look eerily like a bad cold.

The earth’s primordial ocean, which came into existence not long after the earth was formed, about four and a half billion years ago, may well have contained microscopic life forms based on RNA.

And he went into a ten-minute diatribe about the dangers of doing hot work in a space suit, especially with Ebola.

There is no doubt that Ebola damages the brain and causes psychotic dementia.

What happened in Sudan could be compared to the secret detonation of an atomic bomb. If the human race came close to a major biological accident, we never knew it.

In any case, the Ebola Sudan virus destroyed a few hundred people in central Africa the way a fire consumes a pile of straw—until the blaze burns out at the center and ends in a heap of ash—rather than smoldering around the planet, as AIDS has done, like a fire in a coal mine, impossible to put out.

The mother was dying of Ebola and had given the virus to her unborn baby.

The fetus had evidently crashed and bled out inside the mother’s womb.

This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic.

The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck.

It keeps on multiplying until areas of tissue all through the body are filled with crystalloids, which hatch, and more Ebola particles drift into the bloodstream, and the amplification continues inexorably until a droplet of the host’s blood can contain a hundred million individual virus particles.

Officials at the WHO began to fear that Nurse Mayinga would become the vector for a world-wide plague.

None of the local people or the cattle tested positive for Marburg antibodies

if they had tested positive, it would have shown that they had been exposed to Marburg.