Virus Ground Zero
Ed Regis
244 pages
published in 1996

You could consider Virus Ground Zero as a quick cash-in on the succes of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, which came out the year before, as it deals with largely the same subject (Ebola, dangerous viruses and the Center for Disease Control), its packaging resmebles the earlier book somewhat and finally the treatment of this subject is largely the same as Preston's. Like Preston, Ed Regis takes one incident and describes this at length and like Preston intermixes this story with a more general look at the work for the Center of Disease Control and the history of dangerous new viruses.

Where Regis differs from Preston, is in his appraisal of these viruses. In The Hot Zone, Preston emphasises the dangers of viruses like Ebola or Marburg, whereas Regis is more skeptical of this danger. He doesn't deny that these are nasty diseases to get, but he argues that their danger is overrated. Basically these are diseases that are hard to get, easy to control and only get a chance to go epidemic when basic precautions aren't taken. Isolating patiens, the proper antiseptic procedures and common household bleach are enough to stop these epidemics in their path. These are not "omnipotents agents hell-bent on wiping out humankind", as Regis charactarises the more extreme responses to these viruses, but diseases born out of third world poverty and bad hospitals.

The way he shows this is by looking at the 1995 outbreak of Ebola which happened in Kikwit, a town in a remote corner of Zaire. Before the epidemic was stopped, some 300 people would die of it, which sounds like a lot, but considering the region had a population of roughly 500,000, this is actually a mortality rate of less than 0.1 percent... It is only because the disease wasn't recognised at first, the hospital in Kikwit had little or no reseources to combat it and because of extreme poverty had to resort to such dangerous practises as using throwaway needles multiple times that Ebola got a chance to grow into an epidemic. When the CDC appear on the scene with their much greater resources, it is quickly stopped in its tracks and traced to its source.

Inbetween the chapters dealing with the Kikwit outbreak, Virus Ground Zero explains the history of the CDC, how it started out as an agency dedicated to wiping out malaria in the Southern US and just grew from there... The problem with these chapters is that the CDC and its history really deserves a book of its own; Regis doesn't do the subject justice here.

In conclusion then, this is a book that is derivative in many ways, but still has something original to say. If you liked The Hot Zone, would like to read more on the subject and haven't found other books on it, then I suggest this is good enough to get from the library, if perhaps not to buy for yourself. Not quite recommended.