In light of a recent discussion on another board pertaining to a Russian scientist who died from Ebola in a lab, I started thinking about Ebola.
It seems that outbreaks of Ebola in Africa just seem to appear out of nowhere. So, when Ebola isn’t causing mayhem in humans, where does it reside? In the air? In animals? Somewhere else?
I understand that Ebola is also deadly to monkeys (or at least one strain is, the one named after the lab in the USA). If the current thinking is that Ebola in humans is passed on from monkeys, then the same question applies, how do the monkeys get infected? Is there a constant outbreak of the virus amongst the monkey population?
Last I heard no one knew for sure. It is suspected that some jungle animal or other is a host. To this animal the virus may not even be that serious, but when it passes on to a human - it’s deadly. I don’t believe that a host has ever been found to date though
The Pravda article corroborates everything else I could find from earlier literature. My guess is that, while it is a truly horrible disease, the fact that outbreaks burn themselves out before any real madness can happen makes it less appealing to study as opposed to other horrors like HIV. Really the only way to find out where it hides is to go stomping off into the African jungle looking for it…and it just might find YOU. Now who wants to do that kind of research?
You clearly haven’t read Preston’s book The Hot Zone, where he talks about the difficulty of finding the animal host, and noting the possible connection to Kituum (sp?) Cave in East Africa.
kid , the population of Egypt is much higher than central Africa.
Extensive river transport could spread this up & down the Nile.
These facts not only suggest high fatalities, but with additional victims, open up the possibility of mutated strains appearing very quickly. Think of each victim as an incubator, & you’ll see what I mean.
Since the Nile is a rich ecosystem, whole new types of host organisms could appear.
Scientists cleaned out the cave though and found no trace of the virus inside.
BTW although Preston’s book is a great read for the strong-stomached among us, it has been criticised by people who actually work with the virus for distorting some of the facts of the disease for sensationalistic purposes (e.g. contrary to his portrayal, it doesn’t make your organs ‘melt’).
I’m far from an expert on the subject but it’s my understanding that the virus would be harmless to the host animal - it wouldn’t be in the virus’s self-interest to harm its natural host.
heh im even further from experthood it seems I was sure the virus would, at the least, be a lot less serious to the natural host, but I wasn’t sure it would be completely benign to it. Thanks for the data top up!
This just opens up a whole collection of mean spirited humor.
From what I understand, you can (currently) only contract ebola through close contact with an infected person’s juice–which flows abnormally freely in the disease’s later stages. Lord willing if it gets to The Nile or even to Cairo this will still be the case and it would still be *relatively * easy to quarrantine.
But then again, if it’s managed to get hardy enough to migrate so far, let’s just hope it did so in a rapidly moving individual and not via a new vector (mosquito!). Put that bit of genetic nastiness on a mosquito and all of a sudden West Nile will look like a sniffle.
My bet it’s “dormant” host is an ant, or something like it, that can survive on only one specie of plant–and so doesn’t carry the virus outside its territory; and then the ant gets ingested by a monkey or a wandering hunam and all hell breaks loose.
Preston describes the investigation of the cave, with no result. But it, or the locale, do seem to be implicated, if we can rely even that far upon his book.
It’s obvious even from the book itself that you have to take Preston with some salt. After a great buildup about how even a speck of retrovirus can be lethal, halfway through the book he introduces a doctor who criticizes those who are too timid to work with the disease, saying he’s worked in blood-smeared dwellings. Either the buildup or this guy are wrong, obviously. Preston doesn’t comment on the discrepancy.
Actually BosdaSudan (EBOS) is a separate, less virulent strain.
The reservoir for the virus is not yet known, but it’s probably bats, rats, or monkeys.
Actually Ebola has a fortunate side effect that will probably prevent any huge outbreak in that it kills so quickly that it actually controls its own population. It is what we call in the Microbiology world an “unsuccessful” virus. It is unsuccessful in that it kills the host so quickly that it isn’t readily spread to others, thus its pool of possible hosts is quickly eliminated. The most successful viruses have life cycles that include lingering in a host, then passing to vector, lingering more, reproducing in one or the other, and cycling through. (think malaria) Moreover, since the virus has yet mutated in humans to an airborne particulate (it has in Chimpanzees) it is still, at least, gounded.
In the original outbreaks of the disease in Zaire (now Congo), one of the major problems was the way that the populations effected handled their dead. The virus is spread by direct contact, and the occupants of the area originally infected, had intense contact with the deceased. Thus passing the disease to a new host.
Fortunately, education of the population has helped tremendously, and thus the disease is better contained when an outbreak does happen.
Malaria’s not a virus - think herpes or the common cold, instead.
There was a NOVA documentary on the outbreak in … Zaire, I think it was? Anyway, at one point, they’d traced the outbreak back to the initial case, and they went out to collect animals in the area where he worked and lived. There was a shot of three or four scientists in space suits collecting and examining rodents and insects while unprotected locals were walking around, carrying on about their business, and laughing at the scientists. They collected every kind of animal they could find and examined them without any luck at finding the natural reservoir. The speculation was that it’s probably not very common in the wild to begin with, and it’s probably not easily transmitted to humans.
