Reston Maryland which is a suburb of Washington DC. and the second major area is
in Kenya Africa. The story takes place in the 1980’s. Main Characters: Since
this story is a true story there is no one character that is a main character.
The author does not create the story around any one main character so I’ll just
list every character I can remember from the book. 1. Charles Monet: He was the
first host to the deadly ebola virus breakout in Africa. He was 56 years old and
was kind of a loner according to the authors interviews with people. 2. Dr.
Mosoke: He was Charles Monets doctor when Charles crashed and bled out which
means when the host suddenly starts bleeding infectious blood out of every
orifice in the body. 3. Nancy Jaax: She was a veterinary pathologist at a
military fort in Maryland.. 4. Jerry Jaax: He was a veterinarian and husband to
Nancy Jaax. 5. Peter Jahrling: He was a disease expert at Fort Detrick 6. Gene
Johnson: He was in charge of the Reston operation. He also was the discoverer of
Ebola Sudan. 7. Nun: The Nun’s name was unknown but she had the very first
recorded case of Ebola Zaire which is the most dangerous of the three strains.
Summary: This is a true story. On New Year’s Day 1980 a man named Charles Monet
went on a trip with a girl friend of his up to Mnt. Elgon in West Kenya. They
spent the night there and went to a large cave there called Kitcum cave. After
his trip to Kitcum cave he went home and three days later had a huge headache
that wouldn’t go away. That is the first symptom of this deadly disease. A few
days later he went to the doctors and they told him he should go to a bigger
hospital in Nairobi. Charles caught a flight to Nairobi an the ninth day after
his visit to kitcum cave. All through the flight to Nairobi he was throwing up
blood mixed with a black liquid. When he got to the hospital he sat down and
waited to be served. Then his spine went limp and nerveless and he lost all
sense of balance. he started going into shock. He then started throwing up an
incredible amount of blood from his stomach and spilt it on to the floor. The
people who were there said the only sound was the choking in his throat from his
constant vomiting while he is unconscious. Then came the sound of bed sheets
being torn in half which is the sound of his bowels opening up and venting blood
from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. His gut is sloughed.
The linings of his intestines come off and were being expelled from his body
along with huge amounts of blood. This dying process which happens to nine out
of ten people who come in contact with the deadly disease is called crashing and
bleeding. Samples of his blood were flown to all the major disease labs in the
world. The disease was a Marburg Strain. In Sudan the same types of deaths were
wiping out whole tribes. So Gene Johnson flew over there and worked with sick
members of the tribes to try and find a cure. This strain of Marburg was called
Ebola Sudan for were it was found. Later in Zaire there was an out post of
missionaries who would give vaccine shots and penicillin to local tribes. One of
the nuns there became sick with a similar disease. She died and her blood was
sent to disease labs all over the world. The strain was called Ebola Zaire since
it was discovered in Zaire. In Reston Maryland there was a monkey house that
would ship monkeys all over the US. to labs for medical experiments. Suddenly
all the monkeys started dying in one room. Tom Jahrling from fort Detrick came
down and took a look at the monkeys and took some samples. He took back and he
and Tom Geisbert looked at it and thought it was just a small monkey virus and
try smelled it which is a way to tell what something was. They couldn’t tell
what it was so they looked at it under a electron microscope and it looked allot
like Marburg. They were scared because they had smelled the container of the
marburg. They didn’t tell anyone that they had been exposed. The Military and
the C.D.C. (Center for Disease Control) sealed off the whole building and Nancy
Jaax and Jerry Jaax led squads of people inside the building wearing space
suits. Two people while working inside the building were cut and their space
suits were torn which means they were exposed to the virus. They found out that
the virus they were working with was a close relative to Ebola Zaire. They
killed all the monkeys in the building and locks their corpses up because they
were predicting that if the virus got out it would total the human population.
It would be like another Black Plague, but the Black Plague only killed 50% of
those infected while this killed 90%. They put a special chemical in the
building and let it sit four three days. After the tree days nothing was alive
in the entire building not even a tiny microscopic virus could live. But four
people had been exposed to the virus and surprisingly they all lived they later
realized that the virus must have mutated so it would not harm humans but if it
mutated again and could effect humans it would be devastating. This new virus
was called Ebola Reston. Opinion: I thought the book was really scary. It was
scary to see that there are diseases that could completely wipe us out and that
we got really lucky at Reston. I thought the book was also very educating. From
a scale of one to ten I give it a ten because the author uses great detail. for
instance when the author tells the effects of the disease.
