Richard Preston's Hot ZoneIn October 1989, macaque monkeys housed at the Primate Quarantine Unit in Reston, Virginia, began dying from a mysterious illness at an alarming rate. The monkeys, imported from the Philippines, were to be sold as laboratory animals. Twenty-nine of a hundred monkeys died in one month. Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian who cared for the monkeys, feared they would die of simian hemorrhagic fever, a disease fatal to monkeys but harmless to humans. Dr. Dalgard decided to call on the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) to help diagnose the case. On November 28, the Institute's Dr. Peter Jahlring was in his laboratory testing an avirus culture from monkeys. To his horror, the blood tested positive for the deadly Ebola Zaire virus. Ebola Zaire is the deadliest strain of Ebola. It is so deadly that nine out of ten victims die from it. Later, the geniuses of USAMRIID discovered that it was not Zaire! but a new strain of Ebola, which they named Ebola Reston. This has been added to the list of strains: Zaire Ebola, Sudan Ebola and now Reston. These are all level four hot viruses. This means there is no vaccine or cure for these killers. In 1976, Ebola emerged from its primordial hiding place in the jungles of Africa and, in two outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan, wiped out six hundred people. But the virus had never been seen. outside of Africa and the consequences of having the virus in a bustling suburb of Washington DC are too terrifying to contemplate. Theoretically, an airborne strain of the Ebola virus could emerge and circle the world in about six weeks. Ebola victims “crash and bleed,” a military term that literally means the virus attacks every organ in the body and turns every part of the body into a digested slime of viral particles. An important point that Preston wanted to make was the fact that the public thinks that the HIV virus is probably the most horrible virus on Earth, while no one thinks about the effects and deaths of Ebola victims. Preston shows how Ebola and Marburg (a close relative of Ebola) are a hundred times more contagious, a hundred times more deadly, and a hundred! ed times as fast as HIV. “Ebola does in ten days what it takes ten years for HIV,” wrote Richard Preston. The virus, however, has difficulty spreading, because