I just finished reading a book that has creeped me out more than anything since, I don’t know, Pet Sematary I guess, but this one is not fiction, it’s real! When I told Steve about it, he laughed at me and said, “Uh, where were you in the 90’s?” Okay, so apparently this is an old book and there’s a movie based on it with Dustin Hoffman and everybody knew about this except for me, until now.
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.
Come on, y’all, pretend like you never saw Outbreak and you’re just hearing about this Ebola thing for the first time. Oh My God!! Right?? Wow.
What is up with these weird African viruses that can get inside a person and just make him, like, dissolve internally within a couple of weeks until he finally erupts, in impressive geyser-like fashion, with fountains of black blood and vomit? These are viruses (virii?) that incubate only 3-10 days before they kill you, and they have a 90% mortality rate. Which means, if you get this shit onya, you’re toasted. And it ain’t a pleasant way to go.
I’m not going to describe the progress of the disease caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses; there’s no way I could make it even half as horrifying as it was when I read it. I swear, I could not put this book down, but I felt like I wanted to be wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask while I read it. I must have increased my hand-washing behavior by at least 300% since I began reading this book.
Instead, I turn my thoughts to the concept of a virus itself. This book has made the virus scarier than anything I can remember being scared of in my whole life, and yet so small that millions of them would fit on the dot of this “i”. If five of those teeny tiny little things got in your blood, you’d die a terrible death. Worse, you’d probably know you were going to die many days before the relief of death actually came to you. It would start with a headache…
But the virus himself…is he evil? Does he kill? I’ve heard some people say that the AIDS virus is a tool of righteousness, a moral judgment on gay people, but the HIV virus kills “people” not “gay people.” And these Ebola critters are far far far more deadly than HIV, and you don’t even have to have sex or do anything immoral to catch them. All you have to do is be there with your living cells ready to receive the uninvited guest of a virus or two.
A virus is not really even a living thing, is it? It is a simple structure made of protein that just lies dormant until it bumps up against something alive. It’s like a tiny little chunk of your hair or fingernail. Not alive at all, does nothing, consumes nothing, produces nothing. Until it brushes up against a living cell, and then it grabs hold. It penetrates, and then its sole activity is replication. It can’t reproduce like a living thing, but its only reason for existence is to create as many copies of itself as it can, using the host cell’s reproductive equipment and instructions. In Ebola, it is this zealous, mindless reproductive frenzy that causes the death of the host organism. The virus simply reproduces itself so rapidly and efficiently that it causes every living cell to burst open with thousands more viruses, turning the whole body to jelly and dead blood.
And then, of course, in order for the virus to continue doing what it loves to do, it must find another living host, and what better chance of doing that than to end the whole infection/drama/kill by causing a massive eruption of virus-filled fluid? You see, this virus produces the best biological means for its own spread to another host. Even the “evil” HIV virus doesn’t do that! It would be, like, since AIDS is spread easiest through body fluids during sexual contact, so one symptom created by the virus is unusual horniness, making sexual contact more likely, thereby increasing the virus’s chance of spreading. That not being the case, I think the AIDS virus is not evil. Not even close.
This Ebola fella, though, he might be evil. He freaks me out. I’ll be having bad dreams about him for a while, you watch.
