The Hot Zone

Next week I am going to Washington DC so I thought it would be appropriate to post about The Hot Zone.  I read this back in high school before I came up with the idea for The Physician's Library but I definitely believe it belongs on this list of must-read books for anyone interested in medicine, especially infectious diseases.

Normally, I am pretty wary of popular science writers but Preston is really, really good.  He's very thorough and informative, researching his subjects very meticulously.  It's actually hard to believe he isn't a scientist, himself (he actually has a PhD in English so technically he's Dr. Preston).

If you don't know, The Hot Zone is about the Ebola virus, one of the most violently deadly infectious diseases in our world.  The book reads like a suspenseful novel and the scary thing is that Preston has not had to embellish in the slightest.  The book includes a very good history of what we know about the virus and recounts an incident where a strain of Ebola was found in a monkey house in Reston, VA, a city near Washington DC in 1989.  Luckily, Ebola Reston was found to be non-pathogenic to humans.