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Blood and Bleeding
Kinshasa Highway, which spans the width of the continent of Africa, symbolizes the dangers of globalization and innovation. Paved in the 1970s, the increased traffic on that road greatly facilitated and sped up the spread of HIV/AIDS. In fact, Preston goes so far as to rename Kinshasa Highway “AIDS Highway” for the large role that it played in the disease’s destructive toll on the human race. To Preston, Kinshasa Highway emblemizes an innovation that appeared useful and groundbreaking at the time, but ended up causing destruction and death as it helped the spread of a deadly virus. He uses Kinshasa Highway as a warning for his readers, meaning for us to understand that other elements of our modern world could easily be turned against us by ancient viruses.
Kinshasa Highway Quotes in The Hot Zone
The The Hot Zone quotes below all refer to the symbol of Kinshasa Highway. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1, Chapter 3
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When you begin probing into the origins of AIDS and Marburg, light fails and things go dark, but you sense hidden connections. Both viruses seem part of a pattern.
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Part 4, Chapter 1
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The paving of Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.
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Kinshasa Highway Symbol Timeline in The Hot Zone
The timeline below shows where the symbol Kinshasa Highway appears in The Hot Zone. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1, Chapter 1: Something in the Forest
...began to infect humans. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, AIDS spread along the Kinshasa Highway , a new road that spans much of the width of Africa. HIV, Preston explains,...
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Part 4, Chapter 1: Highway
...Rift valley. He adds that the road “is a segment of the AIDS highway, the Kinshasa Highway ,” a trans-African road along which HIV traveled when it first began to break out....
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...the disease takes years to kill its human hosts. Preston connects the paving of the Kinshasa Highway with the spread of the disease, explaining that when he was young, the road was...
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