When a dreaded outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus swept through a remote region of Zaire in May 1995, NOVA was the only film crew permitted into the "hot zone." Spending a total of four weeks in the quarantined city of Kikwit, the result is unprecedented journalistic coverage of this grim battle against one of the world's deadliest diseases.

The Ebola plague kills a very high percentage of its victims (77% in Kikwit), often by dissolving their internal organs and connective tissue. Learn how disease specialists traced the origins of the outbreak by compiling a complete "chain of death" of the epidemic, and why they fear a mutation of Ebola will emerge that is even more difficult to contain. Closed captioned for the hearing impaired.