The Hot Zone💋 (911 views, 36 replies)

Bright to us by Ridley Scott - Memorial Day
Teeny💋

The Hot Zone is a famous book that postulates that Ebola began in a certain cave system in bat feces.

Ebola is monsterous disease as it's a hemorhagic highly infectious often lethal disease. The dirty little secret in epidemiology (the science of the spread of disease) is that while an Ebola patient might survive, the virus still will go dormant in bodily secretions so guys can carry the Ebola virus as reservoir while seemingly no longer infected.

This means they have to commit to celibacy or extreme extreme barrier protection. Yet they don't so it ends up showing up again. If this became common knowledge then severe bigotry would result in mob justice.

Say you are part of a medical team monitoring various countries where it in endemic(locally found and typical in some numbers), well the poor epidemiologist has to track EVERY possible person who might have come in contact with aerosolized particles from the infected. One person in an urban region could cough out virons and potentially 1000 people could be exposed.
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This is very significant on airplanes due to proximity and poor sanitation (you don't want to know how dirty the seats and tables are) and the ar handling system. Not to mention the toilets and sinks.

People with money and resources flee and thus that is how Ebola spreads to nearby nations from the origin point.

The most frequent vector is due to fomites in the patients home when others go inside and then infected themselves. Burial practices in some African nations include clinging to the infected deceased body.

A human body has billions of various pathogens like bacteria and virons. And so the meat sack has a horrible amount of anerobic lethal bacteria as well as the Ebola patient having the infectious virons. Thus the newly infected will get MULTIPLE co-morbidity.

So then you have a nightmarish situation where bodies are openly abandoned and a risk to groundwater then becoming a waterbourne infectious path into shared wells. Soldiers then mask up and are improperly clothed with inadequate barrier protection and inadequate chemical agents like phenol. So soldiers get infected. Then burial becomes impossible and incineration begins.

What they do is horrible. They use "cordon santiere" which means the soldiers come in, block off the village, and then people can't tend their farming plot, get to wells, and starvation and dehydration can kill them before the disease can infect them. In some cases, noninfected children are seperated with no one caring for them, while their parents are trapped in a cordon santiere situation and may not be infected just quarantined as potetially infected.

A friend was a CDC epidemiologist and he told me horror stories worse than any horror movie.
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Man, I love pandemic/epidemic movies. This looks like it's going to be fab!

Thanks for sharing, Teeny

I thought the HOT ZONE had to be about sex. Don't do that! LOL!

In terms of pandemic flu, the typical manifestation is multiple waves and exacerbated by international travel. Say in 1918, that version of influenza came in three waves and affected those in close proximity like soldiers' barracks. One would expect univerisity dormatories and prisons to have massive infection.

In the 1918 pandemic, minorities had a higher rate of infection that was more lethal to them. That seemed to be affected by genetic immunology and or socioeconomic circumstances. Some very brave EuroAmerican women, often wealthy, actually risked their lives and helped these cohorts among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. There were no large bodies of RNs who could help, just volunteers.

It was so lethal that people got sick and showed symptoms and then were dead by nightfall, and so constant coffinmaking occured by family members.

dosmovies.com/watch_movie/Outbreak....
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak...

Outbreak (1995) uses Ebola as the contagion but calls it Mutaba to be poltically correct and not alarm the public. It was one of the first American films to show various levels of containment that are used to prevent a contagion from getting out and the terrible risk from "sharps" and small tears in the gown up procedure. If you go into a clean room you spray phenol all over the gown as often pharmaceuticals for immunocompromised patients are manufactured inside. Similarly in biohazard rooms with pathogens, you overaddress the pathogen risk to prevent accidental infection.

Films like Contagion are pure Hollywood as the detection is actually quite slow. The total time to discover a vaccine and to manufacture it is quite long so most would die and never be vaccinated in time. This is why "shelter-in-place" is the standard protocol. That won't work unless you have six months of food at home, right?

If Ebola struck in winter in America, the gruesome aspect (and this is seen in the film Contagion yet not dwelt upon) is incineration fails due to inadequate fuel sources plus lack of incinerators. The ground is too cold/frozen to dig, therefore bulldozers come in and dig long long mass graves. That is the historical response.

In American history, burials were delayed until the grave could be dug. That poses a dangerous contagion risk often by rodents.

Wintertime causes lack of humidity in the dry air which causes compromise to the cracked mucous membranes and that is why so many get sick. These infected then go to grocery stories and pharmacies where they infect others through fomites by coughing and sneezing and the grocery carts are contaminated.

A nettipot which is an Indian practice (India) irrigates the nostril, flows across the sinuses, then emerges out the other nostril. The water is boiled then cooled with common table salt added. This is good pragmatic cheap and effective prevention.

Thanks for the share. Bells are ringing and I am seeing Dustin Hoffman in something similar. I love these Science Faction movies that could happen sometime in the not too distant future so I'll be taking notes and following CB's advice above.

Yes, I would be glad for several to take Crutchbender's foolish advice during a contagion.

See how that turns out. So far there's one and exactly one medically trained person participating. That ain't crotchety.

Looks good.

Thanks for the post.

I love these kind of movies and this one looks like it's gonna be one of the best! Thanks Teeny for bringing it to everyone's attention. You're awesome!!

I love Ridley Scott so I'll be watching this, and hoping it will be entertaining. Though I'm a little confused because the IMDB doesn't mention Scott in it at all (at least that I see).

"...Based on the book of the same name by Richard Preston and Directed by Michael Uppendahl..." www.imdb.com/title/tt4131818/

I had no idea this was coming up, thanks, Teeny. 27th May 2019 on National Geographic Channel.

I really wish you could start a forum without someone jumping in for their own agenda.😢
Teeny💋

www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/su...

If anyone is interested in the epidemiology of Ebola and wants to see how it spread in Africa, that is detailed at that link.

Similarly if it say infected folks at an international hub in America,most likely on the East Coast or Atlanta Georgia, then massive infection would result and then inevitable cordon santiere.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_s...

We had a scare in 2008-2009 with H1N1 pandemic flu. Homeland Security and the Pentagon were considering mass quarantines. CNN picked up the story, broadcast it twice, and were told NOT to publish that information.

Fox News also ran it at least once before it was supressed.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=WMeT_B515Q...

In the state H1N1 pandemic plans, governors were advised to shut down all bridges at state borders to control traffic. That was included in the film Contagion. That is a very real eerie protocol.
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This is what cordon santiere looks like.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=pj2di0xITl...
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Airs Monday, May 27th

First 2 episodes are up. The other 4 episodes air tonight and tomorrow.

dosmovies.com/watch_tv_show/The_Hot_Zone....