Wow! What a great ending to an excellent book. It was a little scary that he went into Kitum Cave; I would never have done that, but presumably he didn't catch Marburg, because he lived to publish a book about his experiences. I also liked that the author left us with some food for thought. For instance, I thought it was interesting how he brought up that AIDS may be sort of like nature's way of fighting back at humans for deforestation and over population.
In this section, I learned that AIDS didn't really reach the human population until the paving of the Kinshasa highway. I thought it was interesting that something like paving a road, which seems beneficial, could cause so much trouble.
I still want to know what the original hosts of Ebola and Marburg are, and if they can even be found in Kitum Cave. I also want to know if a cure could ever be found for any of the viruses mentioned in the book. The author noted that AIDS mutates too quickly for a vaccine to be practical, but if there were a cure it wouldn't be as bad that there can't be a vaccine.
P.S. I thought the long list of emerging viruses was very scary. I had heard of very few of them before this book and don't really know what they do. The idea that there could be that many new threats to the human race is super creepy!
I thought the same thing Audrey, about how there could be new threads of viruses that we don't even know about yet, deadly or not! It's a REALLY scary thought...yet intriguing... I also thought it was cool how they talked about AIDs and tie all the different types of viruses together in the end, even though we still don't know what the original host of Ebola and Marburg is....IT'S SO FRUSTRATING!(I didn't even think about writing about that in my own post! But I sure have been thinking about it!) We'll have to discuss this Monday at practice ;)!
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