Deadly Feasts (eBook)

The threat of Ebola virus has haunted our nightmares since RichardPreston published his 'terrifying true story' The Hot Zone in1994. Ebola hides in the African rain forest, but a deadlier diseasethan Ebola has begun killing young people in Britain and France. Ebolais a terrorist: it sickens people quickly and spares at least one out often. The new disease is a stealth agent: it incubates silently for yearsand kills every last victim it infects. Ebola is a sickness of fever andbleeding, no worse than cholera, a quick if not a merciful death. Thenew disease is an atrocity of destruction -- a headache, a stumble, andthen hallucination, palsy, seizure and coma drawn out horribly formonths. Victims' brains go spongy, their minds dim, they lose theability to walk, to talk, to see, to swallow, they die slowly, drowningin pneumonia, or they starve to death.

Ebola can survive outside the body for a few days at best. Sunlightkills it. Ultraviolet light kills it. The new disease agent refuses todie. Assault with pressurized, superheated steam in the autoclaves thathospitals use to sterilize instruments for surgery barely slows it. Itremains deadly after hours of intense bombardment with hard radiation,months of soaking in formaldehyde, years of burial, decades of freezing.It survives even the fiery furnace of a seven-hundred-degree oven.

How Ebola spreads is still uncertain, but scientists know it's a virus.In time, a vaccine will protect us from its threat. The new diseaseturns up no virus in victims' brains. It creeps past the barriers ofspecies and immunity. Evidence accumulates that it's a bad seed, amistake of protein, a misshapen crystal that forces the brain to poisonitself. If so, it's a new kind of disease agent that can never beeradicated.

How the new disease spreads is known: it spreads in the cannibalism ofanimals by animals, it spreads in the industrial cannibalism of animalremains fed to animals, it spreads by the eating of beef.

Nothing that you are about to read is fiction. No names have beenchanged. However harrowing, every word is true.

Copyright 1997 by Richard Rhodes