Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Terrifying Ebola virus "quite likely" to hit Cook County

Cooler, Illinois Anatomical Gift Association
     Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story” has sat on my shelf for the past 20 years. And though I haven’t cracked it since reading it last in 1994, I knew exactly what I would find when I opened the book again Friday: that horrendous description of the death of a Frenchman whom Preston calls Charles Monet, a worker at the Nzoia Sugar Factory.
     Monet had been exploring in the bat guano- and elephant-dung-caked caves of Western Kenya. He came down with a mysterious illness that started with “a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs” and quickly got worse: headache, fever, violent nausea, facial paralysis.
      “His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance ... the eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red.”

     To continue reading, click here.

11 comments:

  1. You have much more chance of getting struck by lightning, falling in the shower, getting hit by a car, or having a family member go berserk and kill you. This is NOT something worth ten seconds worrying about.

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    1. Tell that to the Cook County Department of Public Health. But I'm interested in your reasoning: not worth worrying about because ... people never fly from West Africa to Chicago?

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    2. The people worrying about it (other than Public Health officials) are the same ones who ever week think they're going to win $40,000,000. I'm sure they have what they consider the perfect solution to the problem: don't allow anyone to fly from West Africa to Chicago.

      John

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  2. I await a vaccine scare column, or is the drama less

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  3. It will be something to worry about, indeed reasonable cause for panic, should the bug mutate into a more contagious form. Which justifies a strong international effort to stop it in its tracks in Africa.

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    1. People keep using the word "panic," though I see no sign of panic at all. Then again, I don't watch Fox.

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  4. Neil, you misspelled Faux.

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    1. I think anonymous was referring to Fox News-Faux News.

      I have to comment on the rather interesting photo choices for this article. I got a morbid chuckle from the wording on how to deal w a dropped body, and the fact that the coolers look just like ones in restaurants.

      Nikki D.

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  5. The words “Ebola Virus” square measure terrific to people who hear them. constant words square measure equally terrific to those that get the illness and even as scary for the relatives of the infected victim. See more http://survival-mastery.com/med/health/the-ebola-virus.html

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