Oh, and “you may weep blood”-it’s “where medical reporting,” Quammen quips, “meets Edgar Allan Poe.”Įbola is gruesome enough without this hyperbole. Indeed, science writer and New Yorker contributor Richard Preston introduced The Hot Zone-his best-selling 1994 account of “The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus,” as the breathless subtitle has it-with an epigraph from the Book of Revelation: “The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man.” To ensure no one missed the point, Preston attributed the line to “Apocalypse,” another title for Revelation (the Greek apokalypsis simply means “unveiling” or “revelation”).īowls of blood! According to The Hot Zone, Ebola virus disease liquefies the organs of the infected: “People were dissolving in their beds.” The virus “transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles.” One imagines patients’ garments floating in puddles of goo, as in the third season of Stranger Things. Every new infectious disease is a mystery, of course, but the dramatic efficiency with which Ebola kills-it is highly lethal and infective, causes hemorrhagic fever, and has a brief incubation window-lends it an apocalyptic aura. Ebola “begins as a mystery story,” as the science writer David Quammen puts it in his excellent 2014 primer Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus, which expands on a chapter from Spillover, his enchanting study of zoonotic diseases.
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