Customer Reviews

Nova: Ebola the Plague Fighters [VHS]

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I don't believe I can heap enough praise on this video. This is truly an incredible piece of film. I teach comparative physiology at a medium-sized university and purchased this video to show as part of my immunology section. I was expecting a documentary-like video covering the history of Ebola with a few graphic scenes of the 1995 Kikwit outbreak. Instead, I was incredibly surprised and excited to discover that almost all of the film comes directly from Kikwit and was shot during the actual outbreak (i.e., when no one knew how large an outbreak it would become, and when the cameramen themselves were in grave danger). The video follows the efforts of international and Zairian doctors as they work to contain the outbreak. Unlike many similar videos, however, Ebola, The Plague Fighters does not gloss over the social aspects of the epidemic. Rather, the video also documents the upheaval and fear that Ebola causes in the Kikwit community. One particularly human scene involves student doctors who discover the body of a victim, realize they have to do something immediately to protect the community, yet have to deal with the situation even though they lack the proper equipment to safely approach the body. Overall this video provides a unique perspective into modern disease fighting. Literally every scene seems to be more interesting and compelling than the last. Some scenes are graphic, so it is probably not appropriate for young audiences. However, assuming students are warned in advance, I believe that this would be an excellent video to show high school and college students. It is also a must for anyone interested in emerging viruses and epidemiology.

This video is very compelling! I show it each year in my general biology classes (10th graders)and every year several of the students want to discuss the material outside of class. It not only has a lot of good information about the ebola virus itself and how it affects the body, physically, but it also shows the emotional strain put on the victim's families, as well as the thoughts of the doctors working with the patients. I usually show the movie "Outbreak" after viewing this video so the students can see the correlation, and we follow up with a discussion of biological warfare. There are some scenes which are rather grotesque and students who have weak stomachs are warned ahead of time, but the information presented in this video is so powerful that it is one of the students, and my, favorites. To see just how damaging a virus, which is thousands of times smaller than a bacteria, can be to an individual, a region, and a country is stunning, and scary!

The video about the Ebola Virus is well done. The Ebola Virus kills a high percentage of its victims (77% in the 1995 outbreak). Fortunately, the outbreak was confined to a remote region of Zaire in May 1995. Learn how disease specialists traced the origins of the outbreak to one person by compiling a complete chain of everyone killed by the virus.

As a seventh grade student I thought this was an incredible film, however this movie was very graphic and probably not intended for chilrens. I was disgusted at how my 7th grade science teacher showed us this. I give it five stars because while it might have been to much for a kid my age to handle, it was still a very good movie.

As other reviewers have said, it's really amazing how diligent the crew were in following the doctors, nurses, medical students, and other researchers, trying to capture as much of their activities as possible. The fact that the Zairean doctors permitted the film crew to record them in a private meeting, making a decision that they knew the international doctors would likely disagree with, is a testimony to their trust in the film crew.

Which brings me to another strength of this documentary - showing the outbreak from several different points of view, not just that of the white foreign scientists. The dedication and professionalism of the clinicians and nurses doing the hazardous, difficult work of tending to patients gets center stage, as do the efforts of healthcare workers and medical students going door-to-door and preaching in the markets to alert the local people. Even when the young students fumble, it's clear that they're trying their best to make the right decisions. The real-life climax comes when one of their own - a nurse - contracts Ebola and the doctors have to make the decision alluded to above, which may or may not save her life. How they make the call is an illustration not only of biomedical ethics, but also cultural differences.

A couple of books I'd recommend to complement this movie are "Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC" (Joseph McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch) and "Virus Hunter" (CJ Peters). The books cover some of the same events and the authors cross paths at those points. McCormick has had much more experience actually living and working in Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later with the WHO, also joined later by his wife Fisher-Hoch. Peters, if I remember correctly, was there much more briefly and comes across as a bit of a "rock star". It's interesting to compare how this influences their opinions on how dangerous Ebola is, especially if you have some background as a worker in medicine or biomedical sciences yourself.

I do NOT recommend Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone" if you want to get a good picture of Ebola - you'll just scare yourself. While the bare facts as described in the book may be accurate, the style of writing is just sensationalist and should be taken rather as entertainment, like a horror novel.