Ebola on American Soil

Under a microscope an Ebola virus reminds me of a sailor’s double half hitch.  It is a virus of African origin, a hemorrhagic fever, meaning it causes intense bleeding, frequently from every orifice of the body, in the later stages of the disease.  Ebola virus disease (EVD) typically emerges periodically in small villages of Central and West Africa, near tropical rainforests.  

Ebola’s natural host is probably the fruit bats of the tropics.  When the disease moves to larger animals, principally primates (humans are primates) it becomes fatal.  When the people of these remote villages find the ill or dead primates and use them for food, Ebola enters the human population where is kills and spreads—always through contact with infected bodily fluids.  The disease first appeared in 1976 simultaneously in two countries, the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  At that time it had a 90% mortality rate and was relatively self-contained.  Ebola literally outruns its supply lines by killing off its hosts so fast that they have no time to infect other people—thus limiting the life span of the disease.  

            Now, however, the roads are better, we have routine air travel between Africa and the rest of the world.  It takes from 2 to 21 days for humans to begin showing infection from Ebola and during that entire time any contact with human bodily fluids spreads the disease.  The infection can enter the body through pores in the skin, eye membranes, nasal passages (though it is not airborne) cuts in the skin, the mouth or reproductive passages.  Even a man who has survived Ebola can transmit the virus in his semen for up to seven weeks.  In a small, isolated village this is devastating.  In a large, dense, mobile, city environment, it can be apocalyptic.

An Ebola patient is now on United States soil.  We owe it to this man to do what we can to help him survive a disease that traditionally has a 90% mortality rate (60% now due to either better help or a fortuitous mutation).  But Ebola has never existed in this hemisphere.  If let loose it would be in a virgin territory--like smallpox among our Native Americans.  True, I have always thought that the holocaust is not going to come from bombs but microbes, but I don't think that Ebola is the danger we must fear.  Never-the-less, we had best hope that both the technology and the protocols work in this case.  

In all of this, of course, we have to enter in the factor of evolutionary mutation.  Ebola came from something.  It has not always existed, at least not in its present form.  It became the killer it is by changing, slowly, to a form that allows it to exist to its advantage.  Like all evolutionary changes, this is not a conscious effort on the virus’ part.  It is random and accidental, the result of some mistake in genetic formation.  Most mutations are detrimental to the organism and result in death, with no chance for the change to be passed on.  Occasionally, a change is beneficial.  Some changes (like an ability to thrive in the body temperature of a chimp, as well as a bat) allow that organism to live longer, live better, and have lots of other little baby Ebolas that look just like their parent.  That is a successful mutation, and simple, constant evolution.

Where this disease is headed we do not know, but it bears watching.  It is a nasty one. 

Care for the ill and keep the faith.