. I remember witnessing the scenes featuring piles of corpses and the poor and dirty facilities of the hospitals in Africa. But the scene which I was most horrified of was the one that featured a diagrammatic geographical presentation of how fast the Ebola virus would sweep across the United States. Contamination was represented by the color red. I always remember the army general counting down what would happen in the next 12, 24, and 36 hours. By 48 hours, the map of the U.S. had been soaked in red, like blood. I found it extremely scary as a young girl. However, after doing this project, I have realized that Hollywood tends to exaggerate reality. In reality, the United States would have had more than efficient technology and education to handle such a virus, so it would be almost impossible for Ebola to conquer the entire continent. Dr. Frederick A. Murphy evaluated the movie and concluded that Outbreak has "created some false impressions" about the CDC’s authority and the role of the Army in an epidemic situation. "…The movie,…with the Army taking over, is quite fictional." he said. "I thought the early scenes in the Biosafety Level 1,2,3 and 4 labs looked pretty accurate. After that it became fiction, and I enjoyed it as fiction. We know a virus can’t kill someone in an hour. The making of the antisera in a day was ludicrous."I have received maximum benefit from choosing this topic because it has made me more aware of what the Ebola virus actually is and does, and it has corrected my false impressions of the virus. Before, the only thing I knew about Ebola was that it was a virus could cause an epidemic. Now I am proud to say that I know much more than that. I hope to educate others about the virus and create awareness of how deadly it is. I now respect the Ebola virus because I have realized just how tiny a creature can cause such massive destruction; it is one of the very few creatures on earth that has th...
