Blog #2

People handle serious illnesses in many different ways. In The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, he describe many ways in which people dealt with the disease called Ebola. A 10 year old Danish boy named Peter Cardinal, was infected with Marburg disease after visiting Kitum Cave. He started to get red eyes and his parents took him to the doctors. The doctors said he had malaria but his mother thought he was dying. His mother was sent into a frantic worried about her sons life so she made the doctors send Peter to Nairobi hospital.(pg 101) The mother dealt with the serious illness by demanding things and wanting answers. Nurse Mayinga had treated the Nun who died of Ebola while she was sick. Soon after the Nurse started to have symptoms of the disease. Instead of being quarantined, she went on with her daily life and went into town one day. She risked the chance of infecting thousands of people. Instead of handling her illness, she decided to run away from it. (pg 84). From my own experiences I have learned of how people deal with serious illnesses in different ways. In January of 2015, my grandfather was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was given a year to live. After this news, he segregated himself from everyone, even his family. He was angry over the diagnoses and didn't talk to anyone. He allowed no one to visit him because he wanted no one to see him deteriorating. He chose to be angry as a way of coping with his serious illness.

Blog #1

One ethical dilemma that is faced in the novel The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is when Nancy Jaxx is discriminated for being a woman and wanting to work with a Level 4 hot agent. Nancy Jaxx had tried to work with Level 3 agents but she wasn't qualified due to issues with her vaccinations. This led her to only being able to volunteer to participate with the deadly Level 4 agents. Nancy volunteered to participate in Gene Johnson's Ebola project as a pathologist. People in the Institute had issues with Jaxx participating in this project due to the fact that she was a married woman with children. They claimed she might panic, that she had clumsy hands, that she might cut herself or stick herself with a contaminated needle or stick someone else. They made it seem like her clumsy hands were the issue when her gender was the real issue. All of this happened because she was a female. Her head superior, Tony Johnson, talked to her about the situation to get her side of this dilemma. She said that she didn't want any special favors because of her gender. Before when she applied for the pathologist position, she was compared to a plow horse by a fellow male employee. She stood up for herself and eventually was reconsidered for the position. Tony gave her the job as the pathologist for the Ebola program and decided to have hawk eyes on her and her clumsy hands until he knew she was right for the job.