During this outbreak, there’s now thousands of infected people carrying trillions of copies of the virus. Ebola can be thought of as a binary string (each codon is 2 bits) N bits long. Random errors during replication will randomly change a few bits at a time. Most changes will break the virus, but subtle ones won’t.
If you imagine the virus as a huge number of copies of this string, some with slight errors that change a few bits, inside a given person, then the copies of the string that make it past the gap to reach the next person have an elevated chance of containing mutations that make them more able to survive the outside environment.
Further, when the viral particles compete against themselves inside a given host, well, over time particles that have mutations that make themselves better able to replicate in a human have a statistically increased chance of replication.
I’m not sure why this makes the virus less lethal over generations during a pandemic : one would logically assume that faster replication would make the virus more dangerous as it would take less time to reach the point of causing the lethal bleeding.
The reason I bring this up is I’ve heard that there’s now a large number of people who have died from the virus who must have taken every precaution they could. Last I read, it was about 80 doctors and nurses. I’m wondering if these later generation versions of the virus are now resilient to the point that contaminated body fluids can breach intact skin, or survive outside for hours, or infect a host with a relatively small number of actual particles.
Is this plausible? Realistically, there’s not going to be a definitive answer for some time : only a handful of institutions can even handle the virus safely, and I imagine that getting approval to study live ebola from the IRB is rather difficult for most scientists. Not to mention you can’t ever conduct controlled human to human transmission studies.
I’ll let someone else speak to the question of contagiousness over time, but the “problem” for the virus if it is too lethal too soon is that this limits the time available for transmission. A dead host is a non-contagious host (excepting the practice of certain funeral rituals.)
In the case of Ebola, it would be a very bad thing if the virus mutated so that it was contagious prior to symptoms appearing. At least there is a bit of “early warning” currently.
I would also think that the faster and more aggressive a virus is the faster the host’s immune system would perceive it as a threat. less chance of a person going into a highly populated area. Draining your immune system should make you tired and fatigued
At some point of it spreading and people catching it. Wouldn’t a natural herd resistant also be created bye people who survived it to people they have come in contact with?
In the long run, it is advantageous to both host and virus to have a less adversarial relationship.
A virus or bacterium which can live for a long time in a host without killing it does very well for itself. Think of e coli for example. It will survive wherever humans survive.
This also works well for virulent dieases. It is believed that syphilus has become less virulent through the ages.
It has been argued that ebola’s lethality has prevented its widespread dissemination (before this year, that is). In prior outbreaks, it tended to occur in isolated places and “burned out” before it could spread too far.
In the short run, all bets are off. We can’t evolve defenses quickly. Ebola is not “smart” and can’t choose to evolve benignly. I expect that any mutation that enhances communicability will be favored, and only after it becomes widespread will evolutionary forces favor attenuation to a more endemic form (which may be something with occasional epidemics, like measles or flu or rotavirus or polio or …)
I mean its mostly warm climates on past outbreaks. Has any articals even been release on what makes it dormant? Every thing even a virus has some sort of check and balance in nature. That and if bats carry it are they immune to it or just as threaten bye it?
In regard of how it could be done, I have to disappoint you, I don’t know but all we know or rather don’t know about it’s apperance, spread and origine of the three strains that I know about, I would argue that it is a bit “funny” how the reporting is being handled, especially the last case of the victim that got released out of the hospital he was admitted in the US and now is allegedly dying of ebola(strain?), it makes me wonder some times what’s going on…
What do you mean by “dormant”? I’m curious - is English your second language? Your posts are full of misspelling and odd constructions.
It is believed that the virus exists primarily in some animal population, MAYBE bats, but it’s far from conclusive. It doesn’t go “dormant”, it’s just that people aren’t always stumbling across animals sick with it can catching it.
Whatever animal normally harbors it probably is made sick from it, just maybe not as sick as people are.
I’ll grant you that the reporting is “funny” but that’s because journalism these days is a freakin’ joke and the news outlets won’t take the time to confirm facts or educate themselves, it’s all about sound bites and scaring people so they’ll keep watching.
Ebola is NOT a genetically engineered disease. It’s been know to science since the mid-1970’s, which predates genetic engineering.
As for Dr. Richard Sacra, the man who has re-entered the hospital, he did indeed recover from ebola but is now believed to have a serious a case of pneumonia which is not an unknown complication of many serious diseases. Given that ebola can cause lung damage (that’s one of the reasons people can cough up blood while ill with it) coming down with pneumonia afterwards shouldn’t be some mysterious thing.
IIRC, Ebola mutates so fast that it can easily mutate itself into becoming weaker or less well adapted to the host. Such fast mutation makes it fast to adapt, but also means it can lose any adaptations it makes just as fast. To touch on one of your own points, if viral particles mutate to be better able to replicate in the body and out-compete the rest that way, it can easily lose some of its ability to be transmitted to the next host at the same time.
I remember one speculative treatment proposed for Ebola of somehow temporarily shutting off the victim’s immune system, because it actually relies on the victim’s immune system to weed out dysfunctional copies due to how fast it mutates. The idea being that if the immune system could be shut off for a short time the virus would mutate away from being adapted to fight back, and when the immune system started working again it would be able to overwhelm the resulting dysfunctional mutants.
I did not write that the original three strains that I know about, Marburg 1967, Ebola Sudan 1976 and Ebola Zaire 1976, with Ebola Zaire having the most fatalities >90% death ones infected, were genetically engineered. But I am aware that there are now new strains appearing and that’s where the idea comes from…
The book “The Hot Zone” from Richard Preston gives quite a detailed account of what is know of Ebola.
It seems to me that many of the Westerners who write this kind of comment imagine falsely that the hospital conditions which the medical staff in the West Africa approach what they think of as the hospital and the clinic conditions and have a false idea that somehow the virus is overcoming such conditions.
This is not the case. Where these infections have hit the medical staff is in places where there is not reliable electrical service even, nor even reliable water in the hospital, and not sufficient gloves and the other basic protections. It is noticeable that in the Nigerian and the Senegalese cases, which were treated in better but still not western hospital conditions and under less of the stress as in the Sierre Leone and the Liberia, the transmission has not occurred.
The problem is that many are seeing some monster virus when in fact what we are seeing in the two countries the very hardest hit is the result of the most extreme of the bad sanitation and the bad medical infrastructure.
The most accurate reports have already noted that the current strain in the West Africa are a mutation of the Zaire strain that seperated a guessed ten years ago. The marburg is not the same virus, it is a close relative.
The high death rates of the outbreaks in the DRC/Zaire can be as much due to the great and extreme isolation with even less medical infrastructure.
This was written in 1995. What was known in 1995.
Instead of of making conspiracy theories it is more useful to support the development of better basic medical services in the West Africa. It is not strange that this occured, it is only sad.
Just to add another note of discord, evolutionary forces cannot make Ebola more contagious. Change like that comes from mutation. Evolutionary forces control what would happen to that mutant after the mutation arose.
Right now its spread is limited because victims get very sick very fast and cannot spread it so far, even in this era of modern travel.
Infect many thousands, tens of thousands, as is likely to happen without investing sizable resources in Africa NOW, and the odds of mutations arising that lower its severity some significant amount, leaving victims not able to be rapidly identified and able to mingle far and wide before some sizable percent then die and some sizable percent survive … and we have a worldwide major problem. Adversarial less enough that a majority will survive and that many are able to function in a contagious state for a prolonged period of time but still with a fairly high mortality rate with a population that has no past immunity to the bug … that’s the recipe for major pandemic.
Just be aware … China is heavily involved in Africa with many nationals there. If one of their nationals comes home and it jumps into that country with that population density and its current health system … we’s all in trouble.
If this is intended as joke, in GQ we request that people wait until a serious answer has been provided before making jokes. If it is something else, then it also has no place in GQ. Don’t do this again.
This doesn’t sound correct…do you happen to have a link for that? Ebola shuts down the initial immune response which allows rapid replication. My understanding is that cell death from subsequent infection of different organs results in a cytokine storm that can cause the hemorrhaging. I know one compound that stimulates the immune system is currently in development as a treatment for ebola. If you are referring to shutting down the cytokine storm at the end then that makes sense.