The Hot Zone - Libro en Inglés

The Hot Zone – Richard Preston

In 1989, in a quiet office park in Reston, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., a shipment of laboratory monkeys began to die. The cause turned out to be a strain of Ebola, one of the most lethal viruses known, and a team of army scientists and soldiers was sent in to contain it before it could spread.

In The Hot Zone, Richard Preston tells that astonishing true story and traces the origins of the filovirus family deep in the rainforests of Central Africa. He takes readers into the hospital wards where the viruses first emerged, into Kitum Cave on Mount Elgon where they may hide, and into the high-security laboratories where researchers in pressurized biohazard suits risk their lives to study them. Along the way he introduces the scientists, doctors and military officers who confronted the outbreak, including Army veterinarian Nancy Jaax, and describes with chilling precision what these viruses do to the human body.

Preston’s reporting is based on extensive interviews with the people involved, and his account raises urgent questions about how emerging diseases cross from wild animals to humans and how quickly they could travel in a connected world.

Written with the pace and suspense of a thriller, The Hot Zone became an international bestseller and helped awaken the public to the threat of emerging diseases.

Terrifying, illuminating and impossible to put down, it remains one of the most powerful works of narrative nonfiction ever written about humanity’s encounter with deadly microbes.