The Hot Zone

COMING TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON 27 MAY 2019
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In March 2014, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was first reported. By October 2014, it had become the largest and deadliest occurrence of the disease.

Over 4,500 people have died. Almost 10,000 cases have been reported, across Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the United States. Impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone is the terrifying, true-life account of when this highly infectious virus spread from the rainforests of Africa to the suburbs of Washington, D.C in 1989. A secret SWAT team of soldiers and scientists were quickly tasked with halting the outbreak. And they did. But now, that very same virus is back. And we could be just one wrong move away from a pandemic.

Author Biography

Richard Preston was born in 1954 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received a Ph.D from Princeton University. He is the author of The Hot Zone; American Steel (about the Nucor Corporation’s project to build a revolutionary steel mill); and First Light (about astronomy and astronomists) which won the American Institute of Physics award in science writing. An asteroid has been named ‘Preston’ in honour of First Light. Preston is a lump of rock the size of lower Manhattan. It is likely some day to collide with Mars or the Earth. Richard Preston is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and has won numerous awards, including the AAAS-Westinghouse Award and the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT.