Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control

This fascinating inside look at the Centers for Disease Control is more thrilling--and much scarier--than any work of fiction. Focusing on the CDC's top investigators and their most compelling stories, Virus Ground Zero follows the disease cowboys as they do battle with such unseen foes as hantavirus, Ebola, polio, and Crimean-Congo hemorrahagic fever.

Ever since Richard Preston's startling book The Hot Zone, killer viruses like Ebola, Lassa, Marburg and the hanta viruses have been huge at the box office--replacing bigger monsters as the scariest of horrors. Regis tells the story of how the Center for Disease Control (CDC) dealt efficiently with the most recent real-life outbreak of Ebola in Kikwit, Zaire in 1995. Although they never found the source of the outbreak, CDC scientists stopped it completely within a month. Initial panic by local medical authorities was stemmed with swift isolation of the infected and the training of staff to deal with this incurable horror using the latest technology: "rubber gloves, plastic gowns and face masks." Regis suggests that the threat from viruses has been overblown; his account of the CDC's heroic efficiency is certainly reassuring.