Sheik Umar Khan and epidemiologists Lina Moses and Lisa Hensley from the NIH working in diagnostic and research capacities. On the ground in Sierra Leone, employing his trademark rich detail and smooth story structure, Preston creates portraits of several African doctors and healthcare workers as well as some sent from various international aid and research agencies. Red zones are for known infection cases: “Patients die in the red zone they are not permitted to die anywhere else.” The red zone is the section of tents with strict biocontainment measures, cloistered in the center of a typical Ebola treatment unit within Doctors Without Borders and sectioned off behind fences. Providing background, Preston depicts events from the 1976 outbreak in Zaire, believed to be the first jump of the virus into humans. The deadliest outbreak to date, the Makona strain responsible left 7% of the doctors in Sierra Leone dead. It’s gotten an intense, important sequel two decades after its initial publication.Ĭrisis in the Red Zone puts faces to the staggering numbers of the West African Ebola epidemic that began raging in 2014, of victims and the doctors and health workers who risked – and sometimes lost – their lives trying to care for patients and curb the epidemic. In 1994, he published The Hot Zone, a page-turning, nail-biting account of the Ebola virus told through the Marburg strain’s appearance in patient zero, alongside the story of a strain reaching the US. Richard Preston, author of several bestselling narrative nonfiction titles about infectious diseases, returns to the territory he’s best known for. Viruses may have come into existence with the first stirrings of life on the planet, roughly four billion years ago.

Viruses may be examples or relics of life forms that operated at the dawn of life. Nobody knows the origin of viruses–how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth. Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Book review: Crisis in the Red Zone, by Richard Preston ( Amazon / Book Depository)

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