{"product_id":"panic-in-level-4-isbn-9780812975604","title":"Panic in Level 4","description":"\u003cb\u003eBizarre illnesses and plagues that kill people in the most unspeakable ways. Obsessive  and inspired efforts by scientists to solve mysteries and save lives. From \u003ci\u003eThe Hot  Zone \u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003eThe Demon in the Freezer\u003c\/i\u003e and beyond, Richard Preston’s bestselling works  have mesmerized readers everywhere by showing them strange worlds of nature they  never dreamed of.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003ePanic in Level 4\u003c\/i\u003e is a grand tour through the eerie and unforgettable  universe of Richard Preston, filled with incredible characters and mysteries that  refuse to leave one’s mind. Here are dramatic true stories from this acclaimed and  award-winning author, including:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • The phenomenon of “self-cannibals,” who suffer  from a rare genetic condition caused by one wrong letter in their DNA that forces  them to compulsively chew their own flesh–and why everyone may have a touch of this  disease.\u003cbr\u003e • The search for the unknown host of Ebola virus, an organism hidden somewhere  in African rain forests, where the disease finds its way into the human species,  causing outbreaks of unparalleled horror.\u003cbr\u003e • The brilliant Russian brothers–“one mathematician  divided between two bodies”–who built a supercomputer in their apartment from mail-order  parts in an attempt to find hidden order in the number pi (π).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In fascinating, intimate,  and exhilarating detail, Richard Preston portrays the frightening forces and constructive  discoveries that are currently roiling and reordering our world, once again proving  himself a master of the nonfiction narrative and, as noted in \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e,  “a science writer with an uncommon gift for turning complex biology into riveting  page-turners.”“Compelling . . . stories of high scientific adventure.”—\u003ci\u003eSeattle Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Preston’s] stories sparkle with images of stark beauty and darkness; mature reflections about the complex worlds we all occupy.”—\u003ci\u003eDenver Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“With his 1994 sensation \u003cb\u003eThe Hot Zone\u003c\/b\u003e, science writer Richard Preston terrified millions. . . . In his new book, \u003cb\u003ePanic in Level 4\u003c\/b\u003e, he continues to probe nature’s stranger side.”—\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eRichard Preston is the bestselling author of \u003cb\u003eThe Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, The Wild Trees,\u003c\/b\u003e and the novel \u003cb\u003eThe Cobra Event\u003c\/b\u003e. A writer for \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker \u003c\/i\u003esince 1985, Preston is the only nondoctor to have received the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award. He also holds an award from the American Institute of Physics. Preston lives outside of New York City.\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePANIC IN LEVEL 4 by Richard Preston\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e INTRODUCTION- Adventures in Nonfiction Writing\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Oliver Heaviside, the English mathematician and physicist, once said, “In order to know soup, it is not necessary to climb into a pot and be boiled.” Unfortunately, this statement is not true for journalists. As a writer of what’s called “literary nonfiction” or “creative nonfiction”– narrative that is said to read like a novel but is factually verifiable– it has often been my practice to climb into the soup. Getting boiled with your characters is a good way to get to know them, but it has occasionally led me into frightening situations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Some years ago, while I was researching \u003ci\u003eThe Hot Zone, \u003c\/i\u003ea book that focuses on the Ebola virus, I may have had a meeting with an unknown strain of Ebola. (A virus is an exceedingly small life-form, an infectious parasite that replicates inside living cells, using the cell’s own machinery to make more copies of itself.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Ebola has now been classified into seven different known types. Though it has been studied for more than thirty years, Ebola is one of the least-understood viruses in nature. Scientists have been understandably reluctant to study Ebola too closely because it has on occasion killed those who tried to do so. The virus was first was noticed in 1976, when it surfaced in Yambuku, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), near the Ebola River, where it sacked a Catholic mission hospital, killing most of the medical staff along with a number of patients and people the patients had came into contact with. Ebola spreads from one person to the next by direct contact with blood or secretions, including sweat. There is no evidence that it can spread among humans through the air, although there is some evidence that it may spread among monkeys this way. As a parasite, Ebola carries on its life cycle in some unidentified type of animal–Ebola’s natural host–that lives in certain unidentified habitats in equatorial Africa. Occasionally Ebola comes into contact with a person, and the virus makes what is known as a trans-species jump from its host into the human species.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When Ebola gets inside a human host, it causes the person’s immune system to vanish, and the person dies with hemorrhages coming from the body’s orifices. The most lethal strains of Ebola have been known to kill up to 95 percent of people who become infected with it. Ebola causes people to vomit masses of black blood with a distinctive  “coffee grounds” appearance. Victims can have a bright red nosebleed, or epistaxis; it won’t stop. A spotty, bumpy rash spreads over the body, while small, starlike hemorrhages appear beneath the skin. An Ebola patient can have blood standing in droplets on the eyelids and running from the tear ducts down the face. Blood can flow from the nose, mouth, vagina, rectum. The testicles can become infected with Ebola and can swell up or be destroyed. Victims display signs of psychosis. They can develop endless hiccups. Rarely, in particularly severe cases of Ebola, the linings of the intestines and rectum may come off. Those membranes may be expelled through the anus in raglike pieces called casts, or the intestinal lining can emerge in the form of a sleeve, like a sock. When an Ebola patient expels a sleeve, it is known as throwing a tubular cast.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Some of the action in \u003ci\u003eThe Hot Zone \u003c\/i\u003etakes place at Fort Detrick, an Army base in the rolling country along the eastern flank of the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland, an hour’s drive northwest of Washington, D.C. The Army’s Level 4 virus laboratories at Fort Detrick are clustered inside a large, nearly windowless building that sits near the eastern perimeter of the base. This building is the headquarters of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,  or USAMRIID–a facility that Army people often simply refer to as “the Institute.” While I was visiting USAMRIID, or the Institute, to interview various experts in Ebola, I began asking officials at the base for per- mission to put on a biohazard space suit and enter one of the Army’s Biosafety Level 4 virus laboratories. I wanted to get a firsthand look at researchers handling Ebola. More than that, I wanted to know what it feels like to wear a biohazard space suit and be face-to-face with a real Level 4 virus, so that I could get a sense of my characters’ feelings and experiences, and could describe them with convincing precision. (Many nonfiction writers refer to their characters as “subjects,” but I prefer to think of them as dramatis personae in a true story.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Biosafety Level 4, also called BL-4 or Level 4, is the highest and tightest level of biosecurity in a laboratory. Laboratories rated at Biosafety Level 4 are the repositories of viruses called hot agents– lethal viruses for which there is no vaccine or effective cure. Level 4 labs are sealed off from the outside world. People who go inside a Level 4 lab are required to wear a biohazard space suit, a pressurized whole-body suit, like an astronaut’s, made of soft, flexible plastic, typically blue. Army researchers sometimes refer to the space suit as a “blue suit” because of its color. A soft, flexible helmet that completely surrounds the head is joined to the suit, and the helmet has a clear, flexible plastic faceplate in it; the suit also has an independent air supply. The air supply prevents you from breathing the air inside the lab, which could be contaminated with a hot agent. Ebola virus is classified as a Level 4 hot agent, one of the most dangerous known, and it has the potential to be used as a biological weapon. The scientists at USAMRIID (it’s pronounced “you-SAM-rid”) conduct research into vaccines and drugs that could be used to protect the population of the United States against a terrorist or military attack with a biological weapon, including Ebola virus. This is medical research, peaceful in nature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Level 4 labs inside the Institute consist of groups of interconnected rooms. Each group of rooms is known as a hot suite or a hot zone. Each suite is sealed off from the outside world and is accessible only through an air lock. The air lock has heavy, stainless steel doors. Inside the air lock there is a chemical decontamination shower, also known as a “decon” shower. The purpose of the decon shower is to sterilize the outer surface of the space suits of researchers who are leaving a hot zone, to prevent a hot agent from getting a ride to the outside world.  Chest freezers inside the Army’s hot zones are filled with collections of microvials (tiny plastic test tubes the size of a pencil stub) that contain frozen or freeze-dried samples of many different strains of lethal viruses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The freezers are kept at 95 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. They are said to be hot. They are hot in a biological sense: they contain frozen samples of lethal viruses that are held in suspended animation in the extreme cold. The virus collections stored in USAMRIID’ s hot freezers are said to include strains of Bolivian hemorrhagic fever virus, Guanarito virus, Junín virus, dengue hemorrhagic fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), Hendra virus, Nipah virus, Lassa virus, and the seven known types of Ebola. (These viruses’ effects on humans vary. Guanarito, Junín, and Lassa, for example, cause hemorrhaging from the body’s orifices, like Ebola. VEE and JEV infect the brain and spinal cord, causing coma or death. Nipah is a brain virus from Malaysia that can trigger a literal meltdown of the brain. The brain of a Nipah victim can be semiliquefied as the virus consumes it, and can pour out of the skull during an autopsy.) The hot freezers also may contain (although the Army doesn’t say much about this) an assortment of Level 4 Unknown viruses, or X viruses. The Unknown X viruses \u003ci\u003eappear \u003c\/i\u003eto be lethal in humans, but little is known about them. They’ve never been fully studied or classified. They may include something known as the Linköping Samples, which may or may not harbor an unidentified type of Ebola. The X viruses are presumed to be potentially lethal, so they are kept in Level 4 for safety.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We know that Ebola virus was one of the more powerful bioweapons in the arsenal of the old Soviet Union. In the years before the Soviet Union broke up, in 1991, bioweaponeers had reportedly been experimenting with aerosol Ebola–powdered, weaponized Ebola that could be dispersed through the air, over a city, for example. The Soviet weaponized Ebola was apparently stable enough that it could drift for distances in the air and still infect people through the lungs when they breathed a few particles of it. This is why the U.S. Army was studying it: the Army researchers were trying to come up with a vaccine or a drug treatment for Ebola, in case of a terrorist or military attack on the United States with Ebola.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As a natural disease, Ebola virus does not seem to be able to pass from person to person through the air, though. In each of the natural Ebola outbreaks, the disease seems to burn itself out, and Ebola fades away and is lost in the backdrop of nature, until, once again, by chance, it finds its way into a human host.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e#1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hot Zone [quote]--Newsweek","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299853783269,"sku":"NP9780812975604","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812975604.jpg?v=1767734461","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/panic-in-level-4-isbn-9780812975604","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}