This review of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance originally appeared in The New Republic in the July 17 & 24, 1995 issue.

In the spring of 1983, a flock of wild ducks carrying a strain of avian influenza virus settled on a pond in a chicken farm in eastern Pennsylvania. The virus was excreted in the ducks' feces, which meant that it got onto the ground and then onto the boots of a farmer, which is why in turn it soon found its way into the chicken barn. From there the virus spread, carried by truckers who go from farm to farm collecting eggs, selling feed or taking broilers to market. As it spread, it replicated hundreds of millions of times, and as it replicated it underwent a critical mutation that turned it from a relatively benign virus into a killer. By late spring, chickens were collapsing within days of infection. By October, 17 million domestic birds—broilers, layers, turkeys, guinea fowl—from Pennsylvania down through Maryland and Virginia were dead.

The great Pennsylvania chicken epidemic went largely unnoticed at the time. In 1983, people did not draw analogies between the health of domestic fowl and the health of the general public. But today is a different matter. The United States is in the grip of paranoia about viruses and diseases and what happened in Pennsylvania has acquired a certain symbolism. In the past six months alone, there has been a Hollywood film, a made-for-TV-movie, a cover story in Newsweek and countless news specials and media reports on the subject of killer viruses. This spring a small outbreak of the African Ebola virus in Zaire drew virtually every major news organization to the hitherto unknown city of Kikwit. Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, a terrifying tale of how close America came to a major epidemic of the Ebola virus in 1989, has been on The New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks. And a well-received tome about infectious disease has also arrived from Laurie Garrett, a science reporter for Newsday, which is filled with gloomy quotations like this one, from the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg: "Are we better off than we were a century ago? In most respects we are worse off. We have been neglectful of the microbes and that is a recurring theme that is coming back to haunt us."

In all of these books, movies and news reports there is a sense of fear: Americans have been well and properly frightened of viruses, after all, since the AIDS epidemic began fifteen years ago. But there is also a sense of helplessness, a feeling of fatedness, as if we are all somehow in the same position today as the chickens of the Northeast were twelve years ago. "The chicken population in Pennsylvania [in 1983] is like the world as it is in this moment," Robert G. Webster, one of the country's leading virologists, recently observed. "What would we have done if this virus had occurred in humans? There are millions of us 'chickens' just waiting to be infected."

What are the sources of this pessimism? A generation ago, American public health officials were talking openly about the impending end of all infectious disease. Anti-biotics had been developed. Polio had been conquered; and, in one of history's greatest medical triumphs, smallpox was eradicated. Whatever apocalyptic fantasies existed at the time were, by today's standards, tame. Consider the movies. Panic in the Streets, Elia Kazan's Oscar-winning film of 1950, has essentially the same plot as "Outbreak," this spring's big medical thriller: A deadly infectious disease has entered the United States from abroad and is threatening to sweep across the country. In Kazan's movie, however, the plague is contained by one man, a local public officer. In the new movie, it takes several divisions of the U.S. Army. In Panic in the Streets, three people die. In "Outbreak," hundreds die. Most importantly, perhaps, the virus in "Outbreak" is stopped only when, in a stroke of pure luck, a cure is found; but in Kazan's film a cure for the plague exists all along. In fact, in the older film the prospect of the plague spreading across the country appears to be terrifying not because it threatens the lives of countless Americans, but because it would require a costly and presumably difficult mass-inoculation program. Despite the similarities in their plots, the two films have about as much in common as "Marcus Welby, M.D." has with "E.R."

Some of the blame for this transformation clearly belongs with AIDS, the epidemic that has more or less shattered the public's confidence in the power of science. But AIDS has never been seen as a threat to the entire species. In fact, AIDS is exactly the opposite of the kind of random, uncontrollable epidemic that seems to have now seized the popular imagination. The truth is that it is very hard to find an adequate explanation for the current American obsession. Joshua Lederberg's comment that we are worse off today than a century ago is proof only that he is a better student of microbiology than of history.