When it comes to a serious illness, most people start to panic. People don’t always know how to deal with something serious, especially if it can have the possibly of killing. In the book The Hot Zone there are multiple examples of people who panicked somewhat from contracted the virus. Nurse Mayinga, who had contracted the disease, knew she was coming down with the symptoms of the disease. Instead of trying to fix things and get help, she went into complete denial. She tried to run away from her problems and started to panic a little (page 84). Another example is when a man named Karl Johnson had heard about Ebola and emailed Mr. Preston. In the email he stated the virus was not fascinating. Instead he was terribly scared by it (page 90).  I haven’t had a serious illness, but I have gotten the flu or a cold. I don’t panic when it happens, but I do milk it. I make a bigger deal about it then I need to. I act like haven’t the cold is the worst thing ever and use it as an excuse sometimes to not do anything. So in general, I think people make some sicknesses a bigger deal then needed. When it comes to a serious illness people start to panic and run away from it.

One ethical dilemma in the novel The Hot Zone is animal cruelty. In the novel the main animals that seems to be put through all the animal cruelty are monkeys. In The Hot Zone, scientist are using monkeys to test different medicines to see if they work against Ebola. In order to do so, the scientist need to infect the monkeys with the disease. This is causing the monkeys to go through excruciating pain, while they sit and wait to die from the disease. In the book, most of the monkeys have already died from the disease and the ones that have not are slowly dying anyways. Nancy Jaxx and Mr. Johnson are both scientist that work with these primates. They see hurting the monkeys as a way to help the human kind. Nancy Jaxx did say at one point she felt bad for the animals that were suffering, but she didn’t want her emotions to get in the way of her work. Not only were the monkeys in the book having experiments done on them, hundreds of other monkeys were being sent all of the world in tight crates. This is just one ethical dilemma faced in The Hot Zone.