In Part One: The Shadow of Mt. Elgon, the author Richard Preston describes the initial interaction between humans and the Ebola virus. The first victim introduced in the book was Charles Monet, who worked on a sugar plantation in western Kenya. His exposure to the Ebola virus occurred on New Year's day in 1980 while him and his woman "friend" ventured to Mount Elgon and visited the Kitum Cave. Kitum Cave is believed to be the location of the initial exposure to Ebola, and days after Charles returned from his trip, he began experiencing the initial symptoms of the Ebola virus which includes a headache, red eyes, and a backache. There wasn't a single doctor that could explain…
The #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Hot Zone, written by Richard Preston works with its main goal of educating society on the disturbing topic of the Ebola virus. It attempts and adequately completes its goal to reveal the terrifying truth of the origins of this deadly virus to the whole of society. It is due to the fact that the Ebola Virus is both highly deadly as well as an infectious disease that it comes as no surprise that it is classified as an exotic “hot” virus. While the book takes place in and discusses many different places, the book’s main focus is on the continent of Africa, and the outbreaks that occur there. The first known outbreak of the Ebola Virus was located in a Central African rainforest, when Charles Monet, A Frenchman, was living there. It was…
Recently our world has been in panic about a contagious virus called Ebola. As more and more people come in contact with this horrible disease, we learn more and more about it. We learn where it came from, how you can contract the virus, and most importantly what might be the cure for it. This disease is quickly spreading around the world. Unsafe contact with wildlife, lack of medical care, and inadequate safety procedures are what led to the first case of Ebola in humans and the spread from one country into another.…
Many people have heard of Cancer, AIDS, and small pox all which can be deadly and are considered by most people who haven’t heard of Ebola or Marburg as the deadliest of diseases and viruses. Imagine a virus that killed nine out of every ten people it infected and it was contagious through airborne particles. Even prior to learning about the symptoms of this type of virus it already sounds like a nightmare. The virus is called Ebola and a man by the name of Richard Preston wrote a full length book about the discovery and the fight against this virus in the book entitled The Hot Zone. This book goes into an agglomeration of detail pertaining to this particular virus and it is shared through the eyes of two Doctors at the US Army Medical Research…
The Ebola virus increasingly gained strength and has spread quickly throughout the human population in the epicenter of Africa. Although populations have natural boom and bust periods, Ebola has been dangerously contagious due to the “doubling rate of the viral population” that continued to increase from 2013 to 2016. Because the book was not updated since the author began writing this text and then published it, the Ebola topic has changed. Graffin left off describing that the Ebola virus is extremely contagious in a corpse as the virus settles in the body’s fluids. Poor sanitation and containment of bodies during burial allowed Ebola to spread. The corpses were overly exposed to healthy individuals during traditional burial practices in Africa because family members and friends all touched the corpse before it was laid down to rest. Thus, Graffin suggested that better containment of the bodies and keeping in mind to ensure the safety of the whole population would effectively maintain the outbreak. In today’s recent news, the book was unable to cover the fact that the Ebola virus has been significantly contained due to improves sanitary practices and burial…
The book Night endured many different aspects that increased and improved my knowledge on the Holocaust. It introduced new topics to me that include dehumanization, how the Jews were unknown of what was upon them and the Kommandos and Kapos located in the camps. These gave me further insight on the continuous struggle the prisoners had to go through and how they battled everyday to stay alive. They battle not only against the Nazis but against themselves also. This constant endeavor to survive is a real beatdown to one’s body and even under the tough conditions, some prisoners managed to survive. You realize that when the human body is under vigorous exertion, it performs to its peak ability to support life for greater amounts of time. Night…
Lawrence K. Altman, in an article in The New York Times, writes that “Despite lack of prior experience, the experts predicted that any American hospital could safely handle Ebola patients with little risk to noninfected individuals.” That mistake proved costly in Texas, as Duncan died due to lack of proper care. Michael T. Osterholm, in an article in The New York Times, goes on and mentions the worst case scenarios, that “the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world” or that “Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air”. The article goes on to state that the United Nations must exert more power over stopping this Ebola threat. The article warns that if the world does not take major action now, that Ebola could spread further and eventually become common in America.…
In the late 1900s there were these unknown diseases that were making people die out of nowhere. This made people all around frightened to their wits. No one knew a cure for it or where it originated from. A disease known as Marburg which was first thought to be found in a guy named Charles Monet, caused him to have massive hemorrhages and clotting. This was a deadly disease which could be caught by the person who has it by as easily as it seeping through an open wound. Marburg is a filovirus which can be comprised with two types of viruses called Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire is the worst out of the three, killing nine out of ten humans who have it. An incident occurred in Reston, Virginia where monkeys were being transported from the Philippines to a monkey house. Some of the monkeys started to drop dead for some unknown reason, so Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian who cared for the monkeys, contacted the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) to help diagnose the case. Dr. Peter Jahlring, who was a part of the USAMRIID institute, tested the blood of the monkeys. To his horror it came up positive for Ebola Zaire, the deadliest of the strains of Ebola. This caused a panic in him of which he rushed to his head leader and told him about it. No one wanted an outbreak to happen of Ebola Zaire so the C.D.C. and the army banded together to try and stop this horrific disease from spreading. Dalgard turned the monkey house over to them in which they terminated all the monkeys and bleached and scrubbed…
Is the price of utopia worth it? In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, society is depicted as a peaceful heaven on worth. Once delving into the book further, one realizes that maybe the civilization pictured is not what it appears to be. The occupants of this society seem like robots, completely devoid of any strong emotion with love being the most abhorred of all. Being brainwashed from their synthetic birth, no matter what class they are in, has left them acting ignorant of the world and only able to run on spoonfed information. They are treated more like experiments rather than humans. Dehumanization is unethical and therefore harmful to a society when trying to achieve utopia. Stripping humans of their emotions and their individuality can cause them revert back to an ignorant civilization that can only thrive on supplied propaganda.…
Gallaher, G., Ziersch A., Baum, F., Bentley, M., Palmer, C. et al. (2009). In our own backyard:…
Tankwanchi talks about the Ebola incident to express the racist actions that were present through the course of actions the world took: “in early August 2014 the WHO Director-General declared this outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). But, as Gostin (2014) rightly observed, ‘a major international response did not occur until two American aid workers and a Spanish priest became infected.’ By that time, nearly 1,000 patients had already died in West Africa.” (Para 4 Tankwanchi) This incident shows that society acted after the death of three rather than the death of hundreds. What value did those three lives hold that the nearly 1000 other lives didn’t? The cause of the neglect of the sub-Saharan Africa was that other countries ignored the problem. Rather than lending a helping hand, society only acted when it was affecting their own people. Another example of racism can be seen with societal views of the Syrian immigrants. Due to the bombing in Paris where members of ISIS killed civilians, our views of the Syrian immigrants have taken a change for the worse: from viewing Syrian immigrants, who are trying to find a new life, as innocent to changing our views in an extreme way as now seeing them as a threat to our society. We as America can be said that we presume that due to ISIS associating itself with Islam, Islam is associating with ISIS and also condones their actions; the actions of the few is now seen as the actions of the…
“Afghan Woman Prisoner,” a heart-throbbing article that opened my eyes into seeing what is really going on around the world, while I live a life where I worry about not liking certain food for supper. Ethnocentrism played a huge role in the article, especially the society of being a woman, living in a lost civilization in Afghanistan. Gulnaz was raped by her cousin’s husband, who “forced his way into her home, tied her up, and then raped her.” However, when courageous enough to report it to Afghan police, she was accused of adultery and sent to prison. Afghan were too proud of ruining their reputation, saving face was the only thing they can do to maintain their name in the village and so sending her to prison was their way of saving face.…
Dehumanization is the process of making a person less human by taking away the important things in their life and what makes them who they are; not only the material things but their ideas and morals as well. The Nazi’s dehumanized millions and millions of Jews during the Holocaust. In Elie Wiesel’s recollection of his experience in the German’s concentration camps, he explained how brutal the Nazi’s could be, how they could take a person’s life away in the matter of seconds, and how they change a person’s outlook on life entirely.…
Within this passage, an initial theme that reveals itself is the negative consequences of racial power hierarchies between the Black characters of the play and the White figures they frequently reference. Suggestion of this thematic trend is made apparent through the recurring image of dehumanization of the Black speakers compared to their White counterparts. Dehumanization is “the process of depriving a person or group of human qualities” and the illustration of this occurs when the character of Mbongeni discusses how he, as a Black man, is the White people’s “dogs” (OED). This use of the term dog denotes dehumanization as it serves to dissociate the Mbongeni as being human. Specifically, it suggests that like a dog, Mbongeni and other who…
Nothing in life is fully guaranteed, however all we wish for is to be treated equally in a normal society. When people begin to mistreat others is truly when society beings to corrupt. In Aravind Adiga’s, ‘The White Tiger’, the author begins to exploit the main reasons why people are treated so differently in our community today. Through many incidents that Balram encounters, each one portrays the human inequality rights around the world. Balram establishes three different human inequality rights such as discrimination, racism and slavery through his own person experiences.…