The Hot Zone

3 Pages 736 Words

This is a true story. On New Year's Day 1980 a man named Charles Monet went on a trip with a girl friend of his up to Mount Elgon in West Kenya. They spent the night there and went to a large cave there called Kitcum cave. After his trip to Kitcum cave he went home and three days later had a huge headache that wouldn't go away. That is the first symptom of this deadly disease. A few days later he went to the doctors and they told him he should go to a bigger hospital in Nairobi. Charles caught a flight to Nairobi on the ninth day after his visit to Kitcum cave. All through the flight to Nairobi he was throwing up blood mixed with a black liquid. When he got to the hospital he sat down and waited to be served. Then his spine went limp and nerveless and he lost all sense of balance. He started going into shock. He then started throwing up an incredible amount of blood from his stomach and spilt it on to the floor. The people who were there said the only sound was the choking in his throat from his constant vomiting while he is unconscious. Then came the sound of bed sheets being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening up and venting blood from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. His gut is sloughed. The linings of his intestines come off and were being expelled from his body along with huge amounts of blood. This dying process which happens to nine out of ten people who come in contact with the deadly disease is called crashing and bleeding. Samples of his blood were flown to all the major disease labs in the world. The disease was a Marburg Strain.
In Sudan the same types of deaths were wiping out whole tribes. So Gene Johnson flew over there and worked with sick members of the tribes to try and find a cure. This strain of Marburg was called Ebola Sudan for were it was found. Later in Zaire there was an out post of missionaries who would give vaccine shots and penicillin to local tribes. One of the nuns ...