Ultimately, a virus that is not understood can never be controlled.Ĭhance favors the prepared mind. This mystery makes these viruses all the more dangerous and terrifying. Despite a life-long focus on the Ebola and Marburg viruses, even Gene Johnson has never been able to identify the source of the viruses. Preston describes the fear that is directly caused by a lack of knowledge about the Ebola virus. And they didn't know exactly how the virus spread, how it jumped from host to host. Or maybe it lived in leopards or elephants. They didn't know what kind of host the virus lived in - whether it was a fly or a bat or a tick or a spider or a scorpion or some kind of reptile, or an amphibian, such as a frog or a newt. They did not care to do research on Ebola because they did not want Ebola to do research on them. The organism was too frightening to handle, even for those who were comfortable and adept in space suits. With that in mind, human survival seems to be protected by little more than chance.Įbola, the great slate wiper, did things to people that you did not want to think about. Within the existing flight network, a hot agent only needs to infect one person on a single airplane in order to cause a cascading outbreak anywhere on the planet.

While the technological advancement of air travel has changed human kind for the better, it has also brought us closer to the possibility of our own destruction.

This quotation refers to the double-edged sword of human achievement. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day - Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. All of the earth's cities are connected by a web of airline routes. In essence, the virus does not just destroy the body of a person, it destroys the person's humanity.Ī hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every city on earth.

As a result, when death finally arrives, the victim is without awareness or memory. As the virus causes increasing brain damage, the host's individual personality essentially disappears. Preston describes one of the more terrifying symptoms of the Marburg virus and other filoviruses: the depersonalization of the victim. The doctors remember the clinical signs, because no one who has seen the effects of a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent on a human can forget them, but the effects pile up, one after the other, until they obliterate the person beneath them.

The hot zone richard