Preston Hot Zone :: essays research papers

     Prestons animated zoneImagine walking into a tiny village in Africa, suffering and dying from some unknown virus. As you approach the huts you render the wails of pure agony from the afflicted tribe members. Coming closer, you smell the genus Mephitis of vomit mixed with the bitter smell of warm assembly line. People internal lay dying in pools of their own vital fluids, coughing and emetic up their own liquefied internal organs their faces emotionless masks in the main hanging from their skulls, the connective tissue and collagen in their bodies turned to mush. Their skin bubbled up into a sea of tiny white blisters and extempore rips occurring at the slightest touch, burbling blood that refuses to coagulate. Hemmorging and massive clotting underneath the skin causing blue and blue bruises all over the body. Their mouths exhaust around their teeth from hemorrhaging spittle glands and the sloughing off of their own tongues, throat lining, and wi nd pipe, crying separate of pure blood from hemorrhaging tear ducts and the disintegration of the eyeball lining and bleeding from every opening on the body. You see the blood spattered way and pools of black vomit, expelled during the epileptic convulsions that accompany the last stages of death. Their subject matters have bled into themselves, heart muscles softened and hemorrhaging , the brain clogged with dead blood cells (sludging of the brain), the liver bulgy and yellow with deep cracks and the spleen a single hard blood clot. Babies with bloody noses born with red eyes lay dead from spontaneous abortions of affected mothers. It is the human slate-wiper, the invisible ultimate death, the filovirus named Ebola.     The theme of Richard Prestons Hot Zone seems deal with mans one predator, the invisible one, the one thing that man cannot taste out and conquer, the one that lurks unseen and undetected in the shadows waiting for a warm body to make its new breeding ground in, with gibe disregard for person, social class, or status. We are "meat", as the biologists at the USAMRIID Institute stated, no names, no faces, no "individuality", the virus rips finished our bodies with no thought, mechanical reproducers who sabotage our cells and used them as incubators until their "offspring" double to the fountainhead the cell wall bursts, releasing hundreds of new virus particles. literally thousands of these "killers", as humans see them can be held on the point of an ink pen.