The Hot Zone

I am still not out of the hangover of 'Shantaram' yet I have already started reading a new book. I picked up two news books from flea market yesterday. The one I am reading now is called 'The Hot Zone(THZ)' and the other one in the pipeline is 'Hannibal'. After reading such profound books like Shantaram for couple of weeks, the character and the story gets under your skin and its difficult to shrug it off. However THZ is already creeping under me. THZ is a true research novel written by an author of MIT leneage and is based on true life accounts of researchers and victims of the deadly Ebola variety of filo-virus. Its sporadic outbreaks were seen between 1965 to 1980. These virus originate in the rain forests of Africa and it is our great great greatest grandfather virus - the single strand RNA molecule, which is as old as the primordial oceanic ancestors of ours and is the basic buidling block of earth life. AIDS, Rabies, yellow fever and even common cold virus etc are its siblings and derivates in some form. And this virus seems to have deadly combination of all other lethal viruses known. What the AIDS virus can do to humans in 10 years this virus does it in 10 days and that to with such viciousness that organs within a persons body simply melts within and victim bleeds to death from all orifices like an exploding bomb when the desease is at its peak!! Mortality rate is 9 out of 10. But only solace is that unlike AIDS this virus has not yet learnt how to survive longer in its host i.e. humans. It kills the victim in 10 days and then dies itself unless it jumps to some other body. That is why there have been only sporadic outburst in Africa and the first one in Germany between 60s and 80s. It is highly contagious and even spreads through air unlike AIDS.So it is just a matter of time before it learns to survive longer. Scientists predict that it is probably practicing its survical skills on monkeys in the forests. It obviously has no cure and is currently dormant in the forests and in some US army labs frozen at minus 130 celcius. Amongst all doomsdaz theories for earth like asteroid strike, global warming, burning out of sun, nuclear winter, I believe that the probability of this virus killing the human race is the highest. All I can do is hope that it does not happen in my lifetime!!