Ebola

reports out all the time claiming something could be a big problem, but in reality it should not be something we should be worried about at all. The Ebola virus is a perfect example of how the media can make us construct our own reality of things and believe what they put out. Ebola derived from Africa in Zaire, where it got its name from the Ebola River. Ebola was supposedly spread across the Atlantic Ocean by a doctor who was infected by the virus. The…

“Ebola is a rather simple virus- as simple as a firestorm. It kills humans with efficiency and with a devastating range of effects.” (Preston. R. 1994, New York.) The quote is from the book The Hot Zone Richard Preston and the ebola virus is kinda like Scfi in my mind. When you think of Scifi you think of awful scary things that could wipe out the whole human population. Thats what ebola is, but its real. Science fiction or Scfi is something that is fictional that uses future technological…

Ebola can have a fatality rate of up to ninety percent. In his novel, The Hot Zone, Richard Preston describes Ebola as, “a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.” The virus spreads through all bodily fluids, including blood, vomit, feces, saliva and sweat. Male patients who have recovered from the virus can even pass it on through their semen up to seven weeks after recovery (Elliot). The current outbreak in West Africa has…

had privately gotten the results only moments later. The test came back positive. Fear had risen in my throat and panic bubbled in my mind. This was not a good thing to happen at all and I dreaded telling anyone else. Patient 0 had indeed contained Ebola. I made calls and proceeded to tell others of our facility. We had to investigate Patient 0 even more to try and find where they had gotten it. If it was of somewhere else we must warn them. If they got it here, in Texas, where was it? How many…

2014 Ebola Epidemic in Guinea and the United States Amy Riddell Kaplan University HS311 Unit:1 Assignment Professor Daniel Gilmore November 16, 2015 Ebola, previously known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is an exceptional and fatal disease caused by an infection with one of the Ebola virus strands that claimed an estimated 2,482 lives in Guinea, Africa alone in 2014 (Johnston, 2015). It made its first recorded appearance in 1976 near the Ebola River, which is now known as the Democratic Republic…

were not permitted to travel. If claimed to have Ebola you were kicked off of the plane. Though the first person to have Ebola in the United States was a man named Thomas Eric Duncan. And American man. He was allowed in planes to travel with his wife to find a cure. Why? Because he was not held accountable to the African stereotypes. When Ebola first came to the attention of people my age they would say if you were sick you had Ebola. “Symptoms of Ebola Virus typically induce: weakness, fever,…

Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone is about the Reston virus, one of the five strands of Ebola, and its outbreak in Virginia in 1989, which startled the eastern United States. The story begins with a hot zone of the Ebola virus, Kitum Cave, in order to provide background information towards the virus and its hunger to take hold of a host. Over the course of the story Preston depicts the viral effects, emphasizes the passion of the scientist, and conveys the bravery in an almost disastrous situation.…

Disease Control (2015) explains that the ease of transmission can be accomplished in the following ways “blood or body fluids of a person who is sick with or has died from Ebola, objects that have been contaminated with body fluids from an Ebola victim, and possibly from contact with semen from a man who has recovered from Ebola (para. 3).” As one can clearly see, EVD is a very serious and very communicable disease with the propensity to decimate a…

Ebola is an infectious and often deadly disease that became rapidly more prevalent in Western Africa during 2014, at which time an ebola epidemic was officially declared (World Health Organization, 2015). Health professionals (such as doctors and nurses) travelled to work within the epidemic to treat the ill and prevent the spread of disease and were obligated to care for the infected patients. However, due to their moral investments in both the health of the community and their own individual…

Pardis Sabeti’s Work of Greatness The first time Ebola was announced as a disease, people were oblivious to the idea that it could kill a person. Nobody thought it was that scary in the beginning. To really find out if Ebola was life threatening, a team of highly trained scientists came in to answer this question. The head of this group was Pardis Sabeti, who is an assistant professor of evolutionary and organismic biology at Harvard University. Dr. Sabeti studies the evolution and effects of…