BOOK OF THE MONTH: NOVEMBER 2014

                                                      
Title         : Ebola: 
                   The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus 
Author     : David Quammen
Pages       : 128 
Price        : $10.91
ISBN        :10: 0393351556
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company  

Ebola has come to be described in horror-movie terms as an affliction, in the words of David Quammen, who is the author of ‘Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus’. It seems to kill like the plague, the angel of death, worth comparing it to the ghastly scourge in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by Edgar Allan Poe. 

This slender book is an expanded extract from his 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, and it does a nimble job of situating this year’s unnerving events in historical context, going back to the first recorded occurrence of the virus in 1976 and chronicling the scientific and medical efforts to understand it since.

In the book, Quammen puts both the frightening reality of Ebola, and the heightened language and hyperbole surrounding it, into perspective. The author combines on-the-ground reporting with research and interviews to give the reader a sharp-edge understanding of the subject at hand: what is known, what is not known and what may be in dispute. 

Quammen takes Richard Preston, the author of the 1994 best-seller ‘The Hot Zone’, to task for his melodramatic approach to the subject, writing that readers should not take Preston’s lurid descriptions of Ebola’s consequences literally, liquefying organs until “people were dissolving in their beds” or causing victims to “weep blood”. 

Through the pages of his book, Quammen shows that the reality of the virus is horrifying without any apocalyptic embellishment. He writes that experts “aren’t sure exactly how the virus typically causes death”; rather, multiple causes - including liver failure, kidney failure, breathing difficulties, diarrhoea, seem to converge in “an unstoppable cascade”.

Much of this book reads like a detective story, tracing the intrepid efforts of microbe hunters to understand how this dangerous virus works, the dynamics of transmission, the geographical pattern of outbreaks and possible approaches to treatment. There are some harrowing accounts of forays by scientists into disease-ridden (and cobra-infested) bat caves in Uganda.

Over the years, considerable attention has been devoted by scientists to unravelling the mystery of where the virus lurks when it is not infecting humans, i.e., an animal host or reservoir, where it can exist more or less benignly. The chief suspected reservoirs, Quammen says, are certain types of fruit bat, which are present in parts of Central and West Africa. 

An important study published by the journal Science in August, Quammen says, addressed the Ebola virus variant involved in this year’s outbreak, which is the worst in the history of the disease. The study, he writes, indicated that “the virus was mutating prolifically and accumulating a fair degree of genetic variation as it replicated within each human case and passed from one human to another”. 

Quammen’s book, like most writing about Ebola, is deeply unsettling, but it’s also sober minded, and in this respect, a standout in the floodlet of Ebola books, many of them quickie scare guides (with portentous titles such as Ebola: The Final Plague, Ebola: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid and The Trojan Virus: An Ebola Bioterrorism Thriller), which seem intended to exploit public fears. 

Review Courtesy: http://www.livemint.com