The Hot Zone

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The Global South: Who Really Cares? A global disease is one that does not care about borders, doesn’t care if a country is developed or developing, if a country is in the global north or in the global south, all it cares about is infecting as many people as possible. A global disease is one that travels throughout the entire world, infecting and destroying as much as possible. In his book The Hot Zone, Richard Preston’s describes the spread of a global disease of a filovirus known as Ebola. Throughout the book, the spread of this thread virus (another name for filovirus) is traced back to the exploration by a French expatriate named “Charles Monet”. Preston reflects on Monet’s exposure to Ebola back to the Kitum Cave in Kenya which ultimately spreads globally through a not heavily regulated monkey trading ring to its appearance in Reston, Virginia, where it became a worldwide epidemic . Ebola enters the body through an exchange of bodily fluids similar to AIDs but the aftermath is nothing in comparison. Preston identifies four filoviruses strains—Marburg, Ebolua Sudan, Ebola Zaire and Ebola Reston—all of which have different mortality rates but the same effects on the body . Marburg is the least fatal with a fatality rate of twenty-five percent, Ebola Zaire is the most fatal with a ninety-percent kill rate. Preston recalls on numerous horrifying accounts of Ebola and the effects on the human body. Ebola symptoms develop anywhere from three to eighteen days starting with a headache rapidly developing into blood clots of all major organs including the brain—rendering the specimen depersonalized and deranged—killing these organs within day. This leads to a “bleed out” in which all orifices of the body excrete blood and fesses . The person/animal is dead within a week of the initial symptoms. The accounts of the filovirus were first noticed in 1967 in Germany where the

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