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“Petrifying…guaranteed to make the world you live in a more frightening place…a stunning wake-up call.”
—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“As spine-chilling a narrative as I’ve read in recent years…vivid and cinematic.”
—CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“Fascinating—and frightening.”
—THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“A fast-paced, gripping medical thriller.”
—NEWSDAY
“No movie will match the real-life horror described in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone .”
—TIME
“A bone-chilling account of a close encounter with a lethal virus…a totally convincing page-turner, proving that truth is scarier than fiction.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“A medical cliffhanger.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“Mesmerizing.”
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Horrifying and riveting…Preston exposes a real-life nightmare potentially as lethal as the fictive runaway germs in Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain .”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“More chilling than fiction.”
—SCIENCE NEWS
THE DARK BIOLOGY SERIES
The Hot Zone
The Cobra Event
The Demon in the Freezer
Crisis in the Red Zone
ALSO
The Wild Trees
First Light
Micro (with Michael Crichton)
American Steel
The Boat of Dreams
Panic in Level 4
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1995
Copyright © Richard M. Preston
Map copyright © David Lindroth
Excerpt copyright © 2019 by Richard M. Preston
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Penguin Random House LLC, in 1994. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Penguin Random House LLC.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Portions of this work were originally published in The New Yorker .
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE TO THE FOLLOWING FOR PERMISSION TO USE BOTH PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL:
DAN W. DALGARD: Brief excerpts from “Chronology of Events” by Dan W. Dalgard. Copyright © 1989, 1994 by Dan W. Dalgard. Reprinted by permission.
KARL M. JOHNSON: Excerpt from a letter by Karl M. Johnson to Richard Preston. Reprinted by permission.
THE WASHINGTON POST: Excerpt from “Deadly Ebola Virus Found in Va. Laboratory” by D’Vera Cohn (12/1/89). Copyright © 1989 by The Washington Post. Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preston, Richard, 1954–
The hot zone / Richard Preston. — 1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Random House, 1994.
1. Ebola virus disease—Virginia—Reston. 2. Ebola virus disease—Africa. 3. Primates as laboratory animals. I. Title.
RC140.5.P74 1995b
614.5’7—dc20 95-5751
Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780385495226
Ebook ISBN 9780307817655
Cover design by Megan Wilson
Cover photograph © Science Source
v3.1_r13
TO FREDERIC DELANO GRANT, JR.,
ADMIRED BY ALL WHO KNOW HIM
THE AUTHOR GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES A RESEARCH GRANT FROM
THE ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION
.
This book describes events between 1967 and 1993. The incubation period of the viruses in this book is less than twenty-four days. No one who suffered from any of the viruses or who was in contact with anyone suffering from them can catch or spread the viruses outside of the incubation period. None of the living people referred to in this book suffer from a contagious disease. The viruses cannot survive independently for more than ten days unless the viruses are preserved and frozen with special procedures and laboratory equipment. Thus none of the locations in Reston or the Washington, D.C., area described in this book is infective or dangerous.
The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man .
—APOCALYPSE