Word: ebola
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Brown has no experience in filmmaking; he is a radiologist in Manassas, Virginia. But like a few hundred thousand other readers of that week's New Yorker, he was enthralled by the cinematic possibilities of Richard Preston's chilling true story about scientists battling to contain the Ebola virus, which is as deadly and gruesome as aids, yet has an incubation period of only one week. The story was full of pungent quotes like "There wasn't going to be any safe place in the world," and "Karl, you'd better come quick to the lab. Fred has harvested some...
Writing with great flair, Preston introduces his readers to the terrors of the filovirus, a family of threadlike viruses found in the rain-forest regions of Central Africa. He describes a 1976 outbreak that spread through villages near the Ebola River in Zaire, killing as many as 90% of those infected. This so-called Ebola Zaire virus is the deadliest of the filoviruses, but its Ebola Sudan and Marburg kin, while not as deadly, cause equally horrible symptoms...
Such dangerous viruses may seem a distant mencace, but as a Yale researcher learned last week, accidents can happen. The Hot Zone details a 1989 Ebola crisis that occurred not in the forests of Afreica but in Reston, Virginia, only 15 miles from Washington. It all started at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit, run by a company that imports and sells monkeys for use in research laboratories. When an unusual number of deaths were recorded among a shipment of monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines, tissue samples were sent to a U.S. Army research center...
Less controversial details are fuzzed as well. The film opens with a World Health Organization team investigating the Ebola fever outbreak in Zaire in 1976. "It was not AIDS," says the text on the screen, "but it was a warning of things to come." How? One has to go back to the book to learn that the Ebola fever virus is unrelated to AIDS; it was simply an epidemic that, unlike AIDS, was contained...
...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...