The Hot Zone Summary

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Michael Graf Date Due: 2/22/2011 Book Report Date Submitted: 2/22/2011 The Hot Zone The majority of Richard Preston’s book The Hot Zone took place in the 1980’s at a monkey house in Reston, Virginia. It reflects on how very easily the disease could have destroyed not only Reston, but the entire world in just a few days. It also explores a few outbreaks of Ebola and Marburg disease that took place earlier in the 1980’s in Kenya beginning with a French man Charles Monet. The books is divided into four parts and then into multiple chapters that divide each part into import events. Ebola is a level four hot agent that kills nine out of ten people. There is no vaccine and no cure. If you contract it, most likely you will…show more content…
It is a city that is growing with new high tech companies and blue-chip consulting firms. We are introduced to Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine at the Hazelton Research Institute. On this day Mr. Dalgard received a shipment of 100 monkeys from Ferlite Farms. They were separated and place into different rooms at the monkey house. They were labeled “A” through “L”. After three weeks an unusual amount of monkeys began to die. Bill Volt the Colony manager at the monkey house began to think that the monkeys were becoming heat stressed because the thermostat was broken and it was very warm. He called Dalgard and he agreed to come to the monkey house to take a look. Upon arrival he was led to room “F”. This is where to majority of the deaths were taking place. He looked at two especially sick monkeys. They had a fever. That night these two monkeys died. Bill Volt the decided to open them up to try to figure out what had happened. Upon doing so he discovered that the monkeys had enlarged spleens, which puzzled him. So he called Dalgard again to have him come back. Immediately Dalgard did, to him it appeared that the monkeys had come down with simian hemorrhagic fever (SFH). Deadly to monkeys but harmless to humans. He was not sure what to do, so he went home for the weekend to think about it. But, that did not last long, as he could not stop thinking about the monkeys. So he turned around and came back. Once returned, he found that three more monkeys had died. He began to keep a diary, but all he could tell was that the monkeys would just stop eating and die. He could not explain he enlarging of the spleen. One day a monkey died, his name was “O53”. He opened the monkey to take a looks at its spleen. It was big, hard, and dry. He also swabbed the monkey’s throat for a mucus sample. He decided that the best thing to do was to bring it to the attention of USAMRIID at Fort

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