Farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from
Baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat u...
We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.
Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision...
The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonaliza...
The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the skull. He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he kee...
In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species
He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revea...
Frederick A. Murphy, a virologist who had helped to identify Marburg virus. He was and is one of the world’s leading electron-microscope photographers of viruses. (His photographs of viruses have been...
C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you...
Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue tur...
The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the...
Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted thei...
Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver
It could be said that without sticky tape there would be no such thing as biocontainment
In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by lett...
Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of v...
Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiolo...
Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants. Many of the giant trees I describe in this b...
And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, Chance favors the prepared mind.