The Hot Zone

In 1980 a man named Charles Monet went on a trip with a girlfriend up to Mountain Elgon in West Kenya. They spent the night there and went to a large cave called Kitcum cave. Three days after his return home, Charles began to have a headache. A few days later he went to the doctors and they told him he should go to a bigger/better hospital in Nairobi. So Charles flew to Nairobi.

During the flight to Nairobi Charles found himself vomiting blood with a black liquid. Charles finally reached the hospital only to wait. While he was waiting and he lost all sense of balance. Charles started to go into shock. He started to throw up even more blood. The people who were there said the only sound was the choking in his throat from his constant vomiting. Then the horrid sound of his bowels opening up was also heard by the witnesses. Blood mixed with his intestinal lining then leaked out of his body. This was a dying process which happens to nine out of ten people who come in contact with the deadly disease is called “crashing and bleeding”.

Samples of his blood were flown to all the major disease labs in the world. The disease was identified as Marburg Strain. In Sudan the same type of virus was wiping out whole tribes. So Gene Johnson (the one in charge of the Reston operation, and

discoverer of Ebola Sudan) flew over there and worked with the sick members of the tribes to try and find a cure. This strain of Marburg was called Ebola Sudan because of where it was found. Later on in Zaire, missionaries would give vaccine shots and penicillin to local tribes to help reduce the number of outbreaks. One of the nuns whose name was unknown there became sick with a similar disease. She had the very first recorded case of Ebola Zaire which is the most dangerous of the three strains. She died and her blood was sent to disease labs all over the world as well. The strain was called Ebola Zaire since it was discovered in Zaire.

In Reston, Maryland there was a monkey house that would ship monkeys all over the United States to labs for medical experiments. Suddenly the monkeys started dying. Peter JahlringHe was a disease expert at Fort Detrick from fort Detrick came and took a look at the monkeys and took some blood samples. Jahlring and Tom Geisbert then looked the samples, thinking it was just a monkey virus and accidentally exposed themselves to the virus. They looked at it under an electron microscope. To their surprised it looked very similar to the Ebola Zaire virus. They became frightened because they had been exposed to the container of the Ebola Zaire so they didn't tell anyone.

The Military and the C.D.C. (Center for Disease Control) sealed off the building. Nancy Jaax, a veterinary pathologist at a military fort in Maryland and Jerry Jaax, a veterinarian and husband of Nancy, led squads of people inside the building wearing specially made suits. Two people working inside the building were cut and their space suits were torn leaving them exposed to the virus. They found out that the virus they were working with was a close relative to Ebola Zaire. Ebola Zaire is the most lethal of all strains of Ebola. It is so lethal that nine out of ten of it’s victims die. They killed all the monkeys in the building and locked their corpses up. This is because if the virus got out it would kill the entire human population. It would be like another Black Plague, but the Black Plague only killed 50% percent of those infected while this killed 90% percent. They put a special chemical inside the building to kill the virus. The chemicals were left in the building for a few days to ensure their effectiveness.

After a few days the building was examined and it was found the chemical had in fact killed the virus. The four people that had been exposed to the virus surprisingly all lived. Later it was realized that the virus must have mutated so it would not cause harm humans. This new virus was called Ebola Reston. But if the virus was to mutate again, the results could be deadly for the human population.

Part II

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