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So we are finishing with The Hot Zone in my 053 class today, and finishing the book makes me think and wonder what it is that I have learned from reading and teaching it? (for those of you unfamiliar with the book, it is about ebola and a small outbreak in the U.S. more than 10 years ago — but it is written as a wake up call concerning “hot” or very lethal viruses, especially in a world that is so globally interconnected.)

One of the things I think I take for granted today is the sheer number of  vaccines available that lessen the chances I have of contracting a serious, infectious disease. I don’t worry about polio or smallpox, although I came of age in an era that was becoming aware of AIDS, I felt fairly safe. According to student health when I was a master’s student, I had a mild case of meningitis (still not sure I totally buy that diagnosis, I mean I was sick but not that sick) — now my students are vaccinated against it. Modern medicine has given us false hope that we can beat any germ, any virus, any anything.

I say false hope because I learned from reading Hot Zone that Nature is ingenious. She can create a new virus that can kick the hell out of anything we come up with, and then some. There is a strange, antibiotic-resistant staph outbreak at schools across the US currently.  Anthrax, just a small envelope’s worth, shut down the federal government in 2001. And, most worrying of all, is the potential (and reality) of biowarfare — using viruses instead of more “traditional” bombs. Think smallpox and its decimating impact on the American Indian population in the early days of White Western expansion.

Overall, I think the thing I learned best and most deeply by reading the book is that there are forces, minute and enormous, that are still beyond our control and may always be. While that sounds terribly pessimistic, I don’t mean it to be. I think we can do much that we haven’t — to help stop the spread of AIDS through organizations like ONE — but there will always be the things we don’t understand. We need that mystery, I think, just to know that the web in which we live is bigger than we are. There’s nothing wrong with having a healthy respect for the Earth, its creatures, and its dangers — this being a theme we will carry on to the next book, Into the Wild.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.