The Hot Zone by Richard Preston In October 1989, macaque monkeys housed at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit in Reston, Virginia began dying from a mysterious disease at an alarming rate. The monkeys, imported from the Philippines, were to be sold as laboratory animals. Twenty-nine out of one hundred specimens died within a month. Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian caring for the monkeys, feared that they were dying of simian hemorrhagic fever, a disease that is lethal to monkeys but harmless to humans. Dr. Dalgard decided to enlist the help of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) to diagnose the case. On November 28, the Institute's Dr. Peter Jahlring was in his laboratory testing virus cultures in monkeys. To his horror, the blood tested positive for the deadly Ebola Zaire virus. Ebola Zaire is the deadliest of all Ebola strains. It is so lethal that nine out of ten victims die. Later, the USAMRIID geniuses discovered that it was not Zaire! but a new strain of Ebola, which they called Ebola Reston. This has been added to the list of strains: EbolaZaire, Ebola Sudan and now Reston. These are all level four hot viruses. This means there are no vaccines and no cures for these killers. In 1976 Ebola emerged from its primordial hiding place in the jungles of Africa, and in two epidemics in Zaire and Sudan it exterminated six hundred people. But the virus has never been seen outside of Africa, and the consequences of having the virus in a bustling Washington, D.C. suburb are too terrifying to contemplate. Theoretically, an airborne strain of Ebola could emerge and travel around the world in about six weeks. Victims of the Ebola virus usually "crash and bleed," a military term that literally means that the virus attacks every organ in the body and turns every part of the body into a digested sludge of viral particles. An important point that Preston wanted to make was the fact that the public thinks that the HIV virus is probably the most horrible virus on Earth, when no one takes into consideration the effects and deaths of Ebola victims. Preston shows how Ebola and Marburg (a close relative of Ebola) are one hundred times more contagious, one hundred times more lethal, and one hundred! ed times faster than HIV. “Ebola does in ten days what HIV takes ten years to do,” wrote Richard Preston. The virus, however, has difficulty spreading, because