Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

The 1995 movie Outbreak, in which a cute monkey carries a nasty virus from Zaire to California, opens with a quote from the geneticist Joshua Lederberg: "The single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus." Early in the film we learn that the "Motaba virus" causes a form of hemorrhagic fiver that "kills in two or three days," and "the mortality rate is 100 percent." After a small California town hit by the microbe is quarantined, the general played by Donald Sutherland says, "If that bug gets out of there, 260 million Americans will be dead or dying." The general played by Morgan Freeman raises the stakes even higher: "The fate of the nation, perhaps of the world, is in our hands."

As it happened, the movie opened a couple of months before a highly publicized outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in Kikwit, Zaire. The real-life outbreak, which science writer Ed Regis chronicles in his fast-paced and absorbing new book, Virus Ground Zero, also inspired apocalyptic warnings. Early press reports cited "fears that it may be the deadly Ebola virus, an incurable 'doomsday disease,'" and quoted a Zairian doctor who said, "The situation could get totally out of control." A World Health Organization official told the San Francisco Chronicle, "If it is Ebola, this is the big one - this is what we're always thinking about when we talk about serious, dangerous disease threats."

The public had been primed to expect "the big one" by books like Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague and Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, both published in 1994. "In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species," Preston wrote. "Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans....The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite." Preston called AIDS "the revenge of the rain forest" and warned, "It is only the first act of revenge." Outbreak, in which the first person to be infected picks up the disease while helping to build a road through the jungle, flirts with a similar idea. The local witch doctor, explains a physician, "believes that the gods were awakened from their sleep by the men cutting down the trees where no man should be, and the gods got angry. This is their punishment."

Regis has little patience with this sort of nonsense. "The 'revenge of the rain forest' doctrine was in fact a return to a prescientific, animistic conception of nature," he writes. "[I]t was a...