The Hot Zone (Book Report)

Imagine walking into a tiny village in Africa, suffering and dying from some unknown virus. As you approach the huts you hear the wails of pure agony from the afflicted tribe members. Coming closer, you smell the stench of vomit mixed with the bitter smell of warm blood. People inside lye dying in pools of their own vital fluids, coughing and vomiting up their own liquefied internal organs; their faces emotionless masks loosely hanging from their skulls, the connective tissue and collagen in their bodies turned to mush. Their skin bubbled up into a sea of tiny white blisters and spontaneous rips occurring at the slightest touch, pouring blood that refuses to coagulate. Hemmorging, and massive clotting underneath the skin causing black and blue bruises all over the body. Their mouths bleeding around their teeth from hemorrhaging saliva glands and the sloughing off of their own tongues, throat lining, and wind pipe, crying tears of pure blood from hemorrhaging tear ducts and the disintegration of the eyeball lining and bleeding from every opening on the body. You see the blood spattered room and pools of black vomit, expelled during the epileptic convulsions that accompany the last stages of death. Their hearts have bled into themselves, heart muscles softened and hemorrhaging, the brain clogged with dead blood cells (sludging of the brain), the liver bulging and yellow with deep cracks and the spleen a single hard blood clot.

Part One:

The Shadow of Mount Elgon

Something in the Forest: 1980 New Years Day

Objective Review:

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”.

Subjective Review:

As soon as he and his girlfriend went into the cave I knew in my mind that something horrific was about to happen. Well really when he saw the crystals and touched one. Not many people know that that’s how viruses form, into crystals. What I didn’t understand is how his girlfriend didn’t get infected. I mean they did have sexual intercourse. I don’t know maybe she did and it wasn’t mentioned. The way that his body started to shut down was very gruesome. As I read I could imagine the way he was looking, but not the way he was feeling. If I were one of the persons on the plane, I wouldn’t have gone near him. You don’t know what’s going on with this stranger. It may be something happening to him that is very contagious, and no cure for. In his case, that’s what it turned out to be, and all it took was a little prick to get the epidemic of that particular virus started.

Jumper: 1980 January 15

Objective Review:

Monet bleed out all over the hospital floor, and that’s when it began. Once Monet passed out on the hospital floor he was taken to the ICU. That is when Dr. Muskoke (one of the best young physicians at the hospital) tried to revive Monet. As soon as Muskoke put the scope down his throat, Monet vomited. Black-and red fluid spewed into the air all over the nurses, but mostly on Dr. Muskoke. It landed in Dr. Muskoke mouth. YUKE! But that didn’t stop him from trying to revive him. They tried to give him whole blood but when the doctor probed him with the needle, blood poured out everywhere. Dr. Muskoke didn’t know what had killed him. A few days later Dr. Muskoke came down with a sever headache. That’s when it began with another host for the virus.

Subject Review:

This was worse than the first part of this book. I’ve never read something this gross in my life. If I was a patient waiting in the hospital to be seen, I would have removed myself from that situation. I don’t think that I could have been a nurse that worked on Monet either. For one I have a very week stomach when it comes to things to that nature. I probably would have walked out of the ICU as soon as he vomited the black and red fluid that spewed every where. As a nurse I understand that’s what you have to do is nurse people back to life but, that would have been too much for me. I knew once Monet threw vomited all over the ICU that Dr. Muskoke was next to being infected. As soon as he got the headache that’s when the thought in my mind was official.

Diagnosis:

Objective Review:

In this section is where they find out what type of virus killed Charles Monet and Dr. Muskoke. It is called the Marburg virus. Marburg is an African organism, but has a German name. The virus erupted there in 1967, in a factory called the Behring Works, which produced vaccines using kidney cells from African green monkeys. They regularly imported monkeys from Uganda. There were five to six hundred monkeys that were shipped to the Behring Works. There were as few as two or three of the animals were incubating the virus. They were not visibly sick. After they arrived at the Behring Works, the virus begun to spread among them, and a few of the monkeys crashed and bleed out. Soon after, the Marburg agent jumped species and suddenly emerged in the human population of the city. An employee of the Bering Works was the first to contract the virus n 1967. In 1982, new eyewitness information came forward. It was told that a Mr. Jones, monkey trader was suppose to get kill the monkeys that were infected with the virus but they weren’t. The boss of the company was having the sick monkeys put in boxes and shipped out to a small island in Lake Victoria, were they were being released.

Subjective Review:

I