Book Review: Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come (2019). Richard Preston.

This is the dangerous and heartbreaking story of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  It is a medical thriller that focuses on the African native caregivers, along with foreign medical aid workers, NGOs and researchers who fought to bring the "deadliest yet" Ebola epidemic under control. 

It includes a disturbing and heartbreaking account of white European Medicin Sans Frontieres staff (also known as Doctors Without Borders) wrestling with the ethical and political question of whether to use a single available dose of an untested cure for Ebola on a key black African physician who had been leading the medical efforts in a local village, and deciding to withhold the experimental treatment, which ultimately was used to save another victim's life instead.

Timely medical reporting on one of the major epidemic stories immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, with all the political, scientific, logistical and ethical problems involved, and the local and international responses that came into play.  It's an important backstory to the COVID pandemic and how the world has responded to it, and a taut medical drama too.  Recommended.