The causative organism is a filovirus. This has an unusual structure for a virus. its natural hosts are feral primates and possibly bats that can transmit it to rodents but it isn't known whether other mammals can harbour the virus without falling ill. Taking no chances, the Spanish public health authorities plan to destroy the pet dog belonging to one of the cases they have identified. As of early October 2014 there have been over 7000 cases since this epidemic began in March 2014, with a mortality rate over 50%. By any criteria this is an extremely dangerous epidemic. At the time I'm writing this, early October 2014, I believe there is a real risk that this epidemic could become a global pandemic.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Ebola
Ebola was one of the 30-odd "new and emerging" diseases that I mentioned in the 2nd edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology (1996). I didn't mention it in the first edition (1986). It was identified in 1976 but little was known about it in 1985 when the first edition went into production. It is a viral hemorrhagic fever that until this latest epidemic, had been confined to small, remote rural village settings, and therefore all previous outbreaks had been localized and limited to a few dozen cases. This epidemic is different in several ways. Most important, it has occurred in densely settled urban centres, Monrovia, Liberia and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Numbers affected have inevitably been much larger, and the epidemic spread has been explosive. Inadequate public health infrastructure and local beliefs and burial customs have greatly enhanced the risk of spread. The natural hosts of the pathogen, its ecology and its possible modes of spread are not yet fully understood beyond the obvious empirical observation that it is highly infectious and spread in body fluids by direct person to person contact. Other possible modes of transmission - by contaminated bedding and clothing, cooking utensils, domestic pests such as rats or household pets, passive transmission by flies and other insects, water-borne and food-borne spread - have been investigated but it isn't clear to me that these have all been absolutely ruled out. Several cases have been evacuated from West Africa to the USA and to Spain, which immediately struck me as unwise. My misgivings have been reinforced by the occurrence of a case transmitted in Spain to an attending hospital nurse.
The causative organism is a filovirus. This has an unusual structure for a virus. its natural hosts are feral primates and possibly bats that can transmit it to rodents but it isn't known whether other mammals can harbour the virus without falling ill. Taking no chances, the Spanish public health authorities plan to destroy the pet dog belonging to one of the cases they have identified. As of early October 2014 there have been over 7000 cases since this epidemic began in March 2014, with a mortality rate over 50%. By any criteria this is an extremely dangerous epidemic. At the time I'm writing this, early October 2014, I believe there is a real risk that this epidemic could become a global pandemic.
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The causative organism is a filovirus. This has an unusual structure for a virus. its natural hosts are feral primates and possibly bats that can transmit it to rodents but it isn't known whether other mammals can harbour the virus without falling ill. Taking no chances, the Spanish public health authorities plan to destroy the pet dog belonging to one of the cases they have identified. As of early October 2014 there have been over 7000 cases since this epidemic began in March 2014, with a mortality rate over 50%. By any criteria this is an extremely dangerous epidemic. At the time I'm writing this, early October 2014, I believe there is a real risk that this epidemic could become a global pandemic.
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