Hot Zone Post 3

I read pages 207-257 this week.  There is a monkey house in VA where monkeys are dying of an unknown agent.  The agent is determined to be Ebola and is secluded and kept secret from the rest of the world.  The CDC and the army have a meeting on how to go about handling the situation.  The army wants to take over the operation while the CDC wants to ensure the thing gets taken care of carefully.  This is like the X-Files when the government tries to keep the aliens secret from the general populous. The information could cause a panic so it is just better that people know nothing of the situation.  The scary situation here is that everything is real and is fully possible of a global outbreak.  The virus turns the human victim into a host similarly to the prospects in the X-Files.  The human walks around for a couple of days passing the virus on without even knowing about it.  Then the person usually goes to a hospital or to their bed where they become very sick and where they require close medical attention.  At a certain point either the person gets better or they bleed out.  If they are becoming better, they will be affected by great anger surges.  If the later possibility occurs, the person will collapse mentally and physically.  They will go into spasms spattering blood on everything and everyone nearby.  Within hours of collapsing, the virus liquifies the host's organs making it difficult to examine for medical research and making it even harder to develop vaccines.  Just like the X-Files, the virus covers its tracks while continuing to survive in hosts.  Its natural host is still alive somewhere in the tropics of Africa unaware of what lives within it.  It is an animal, plant, or even possibly an insect.