Word: ebola
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Marissa Blumenthal, public health officer at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, finds herself caught between micro and macro killers in Robin Cook's newest medical tingler. She must solve two mysteries: how an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (mortality rate more than 90%) got from Central Africa to the U.S., and why it only strikes staff and patients at clinics with prepaid health-care plans. Physician-Novelist Cook enjoys stretching credulity (in his previous blockbuster Coma, people were murdered to provide organs for the transplant trade). Here a league of conservative doctors plays with the viral equivalent...
...shower chamber, they must provide another personal number to gain access to the pressurized inner sanctum. There the scientists wear seamless blue space suits, equipped with their own air filtration systems, to work with some of the world's most lethal microbes, including those that cause Lassa fever and Ebola virus, two maladies that produce severe internal bleeding and are native to Africa. There have been no fatalities in the lab. When a worker is exposed to a disease, he is flown to the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick...
Nevertheless, optimism is tempered by knowledge that the struggle against disease never ends. Of the deadly African Ebola virus, Foege says: "What keeps it from spreading here? I don't know." Thus research work on Ebola at Atlanta's Maximum Containment Lab goes on. Another potential threat is a subviral particle that combines with the hepatitis-B virus to cause more severe infections and liver cancer. Discovered in 1977, this so-called Delta agent is starting to show up in high-risk groups, including some of the same ones who develop AIDS. Even the victory over smallpox permits no complacency...
...animals apparently without causing any symptoms, then are passed to human beings. In Lassa fever, the organism lives in a particular type of rat that infests rural dwellings in West Africa. It spreads to villagers through water or food contaminated by the rodents' urine. In Marburg and Ebola fever, the animal host is still unknown. What makes these diseases particularly grim is that they can be spread person to person, often to nurses and doctors, through infected blood...