Why “The Hot Zone” Is The Scariest Book I’ve Ever Read
Hint: It happened twenty minutes from my parents’ house
“The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston is the scariest book I’ve ever read, because it really happened, and it happened twenty minutes from my parents’ Reston, Virginia condo. It’s a story about an Ebola outbreak in one of the wealthiest cities in Northern Virginia, how the CDC and USAMRID responded, and how a virus with origins in Africa ended up in an unassuming brick building outside Washington, DC.
I remember that building. Set a bit far back from the road, it could have been anything. An office building, an NSA listening post, literally anything. The building was owned by Hazelton Research, and it was a quarantine holding facility for lab animals, specifically primates. In 1989, the facility received crab-eating Macaques from the Philippines, monkeys who were carrying Ebola.
No one knew this was happening. People went about their daily lives, completely unaware the most dangerous virus in the world was exploding in Reston, Virginia.
According to an article from Stanford, antibodies appeared in the blood of six individuals who came in contact with the monkeys. None of the six developed a filovirus-related illness. Ebola Reston did not make humans ill. Ninety percent of the Macaques, however, either died or were euthanized.
“The Hot Zone” also examines the story of two people who contracted Ebola Marburg in 1980 after visiting Kitum Cave in Kenya. Many virologists and epidemiologists posit Kitum Cave may be one of the origins of Ebola.
As we continue to cut through the rain forests, the further into nature we bulldoze, we will run headfirst into viruses as old as Earth itself. Viruses for which we have no cure, no vaccine. Richard Preston writes:
“The more one contemplates the idea of viruses, the less they look like parasites and the more they begin to look like predators.”
One of those predators appeared in Reston, Virginia. Another of those predators, COVID, has killed millions of people, and continues to wreak havoc all over the globe. To understand viruses, we need to respect them, understand they have existed since the dawn of time, and will continue to exist long after we are gone.
