On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared a public-health emergency over the Ebola virus, which is suspected to have killed at least a hundred and thirty people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A small number of potential cases have also been reported in neighboring Uganda, and officials warn that the contagion could last for months. Nearly fifty years after the virus’s first known emergence—in September, 1976, along the Ebola River, in Zaire—its very name can inspire a feeling of terror.

In the fall of 1992, The New Yorker published an article that remains among the most comprehensive, influential pieces of reporting about the disease. In “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” the writer Richard Preston reconstructs an Ebola outbreak that took place on American shores. Three years earlier, a hundred wild monkeys had been delivered to a facility in Reston, Virginia, where they were to be sold for research—until the animals, which can carry the disease, started to die in unusually large numbers. Both the Centers for Disease Control and the Army were soon called in, and scientists and containment experts raced to identify the pathogen and stop its spread. Preston mixes frighteningly vivid descriptions of the disease’s effects—“In monkeys, and perhaps in people, a sort of melting occurs”—with scientific fact and historical context, outlining why Ebola and other diseases, including AIDS, are in some sense a product of modernity. The piece—later expanded into “The Hot Zone,” a massive best-seller—explains why the Virginia outbreak didn’t result in catastrophe, even after the virus started infecting humans. Preston’s conclusions aren’t particularly reassuring. “Did we dodge a bullet?” the writer asks a veteran virologist. “I don’t think we did,” the expert replies. “The bullet hit us. We were just lucky that the bullet we took was a rubber bullet.”