'The Hot Zone' author on Ebola, coronavirus, and what could be next
Richard Preston, who wrote the 1994 book "The Hot Zone," explains what we can learn from his terrifying story of an Ebola outbreak among monkeys in a Virginia lab. He also discusses why the current coronavirus pandemic was entirely predictable and what could come next.
Video Transcript
KEVIN POLOWY: Did you look at "Hot Zone" as a warning or a cautionary tale at the time of its release?
RICHARD PRESTON: Absolutely. And I think that by the time I finished that book, it was apparent to me that there was going to be a pandemic. It's what I was hearing from biologists. And fishing around, I found out about an outbreak of the Ebola virus near Washington DC. A monkey house had 600 monkeys in it, and they were infected with Ebola. They were dying and bleeding out.
The United States Army Lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland-- there was incredible alarm about the possibility that Ebola, or some strain, unknown strain of Ebola could leak out into the human population of Washington. What happened was that the Reston Ebola virus did infect a number of people. But it turned out to be, for some weird, unknown reason, non-lethal, or extremely mild in humans.
We still don't know very much about the Reston virus. But in effect, we got really lucky. We've had a series of I would say lucky breaks since then, where Ebola has broken out, other viruses, other coronaviruses have emerged unexpectedly from the world of wild animals, including MERS virus, the SARS virus.
And now this one is the third coronavirus to come out. This one coronavirus was very predictable. And in fact, I heard predictions that coronavirus was the most likely to cause a pandemic as early as 1994.
DONALD TRUMP: I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted.
KEVIN POLOWY: The WHO is catching some flak right now from the highest office. How would you rate the work that the CDC and the WHO have done thus far?
RICHARD PRESTON: The CDC in general has an absolutely amazing record of fighting emerging diseases. The CDC is incomparable. This is a big fail, and it's heartbreaking, with the failure to develop and implement a rapid test, get it out there. I know and admire people at the CDC. And to see this happening, it's just-- you know, it's just-- it tears you apart.
Now the World Health Organization is a different kind of a beast. It's very political. President Trump has just said, oh, we're going to cut off their money. This is incredibly stupid. I mean, that's shooting yourself in the foot.
WHO needs more support than ever. It needs the leadership of the United States. And the WHO can perform much better with good leadership from the United States, and from nations like Japan, France, the UK, Germany.
KEVIN POLOWY: Do you think we're at risk of being hit by something worse, whether it's an Ebola virus or of evolution of the coronavirus coming after we hopefully get past this one?
RICHARD PRESTON: Well, first, it has to be said that this coronavirus, as it now is, is a full-on nightmare. It's one of the worst things ever, because it's sneaky. It can infect people without giving them symptoms. Other people, it just crushes them.
There are things out there that feel pretty scary to me, too. And I'll just give you one example. It's a virus called Nipah, and N-I-P-A-H. It's been engaging in small outbreaks.
It's another bat virus, but it's a totally different family. It's related to measles. It's been breaking out in Southeast Asia.
And right now it's not very infectious in humans. But it gets in through your lungs. And then it migrates from the lungs to the brain, where it causes personality changes, spotty liquefaction of the brain, and death.
Now if something like that were to become highly contagious, a relative of Nipah gets into the lungs-- if the thing was spreading in the air that caused personality changes and spotty liquefaction of the brain, we would have a really big problem.
