NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An urgent wake-up call about the future
of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists
fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 2013-2014
Ebola epidemic
"Crisis in the Red Zone reads like a thriller. That the story it tells
is all true makes it all more terrifying."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
From the #1 bestselling author of The Hot Zone, now a National
Geographic original miniseries . . .
This time, Ebola started with a two-year-old child who likely had
contact with a wild creature and whose entire family quickly fell ill
and died. The ensuing global drama activated health professionals in
North America, Europe, and Africa in a desperate race against time to
contain the viral wildfire. By the end--as the virus mutated into its
deadliest form, and spread farther and faster than ever before--30,000
people would be infected, and the dead would be spread across eight
countries on three continents.
In this taut and suspenseful medical drama, Richard Preston deeply
chronicles the pandemic, in which we saw for the first time the specter
of Ebola jumping continents, crossing the Atlantic, and infecting people
in America. Rich in characters and conflict--physical, emotional, and
ethical--Crisis in the Red Zone is an immersion in one of the great
public health calamities of our time.
Preston writes of doctors and nurses in the field putting their own
lives on the line, of government bureaucrats and NGO administrators
moving, often fitfully, to try to contain the outbreak, and of
pharmaceutical companies racing to develop drugs to combat the virus. He
also explores the charged ethical dilemma over who should and did
receive the rare doses of an experimental treatment when they became
available at the peak of the disaster.
Crisis in the Red Zone makes clear that the outbreak of 2013-2014 is a
harbinger of further, more severe outbreaks, and of emerging viruses
heretofore unimagined--in any country, on any continent. In our ever
more interconnected world, with roads and towns cut deep into the
jungles of equatorial Africa, viruses both familiar and undiscovered are
being unleashed into more densely populated areas than ever before.
The more we discover about the virosphere, the more we realize its
deadly potential. Crisis in the Red Zone is an exquisitely timely
book, a stark warning of viral outbreaks to come.
