America is Exposed to Ebola for the First Time

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.  There is no cure and no vaccine (what we are trying is only in an experimental stage).  It has a mortality rate of from 90% to 60% depending on the medical care a patient receives and the simple luck of ones DNA.  The virus, like all viruses, is designed to live on.  A man who has survived Ebola can transmit the virus in his semen for up to seven weeks after he is declared, “cured.” 

Like HIV, which also began in equatorial Africa (face it, those moist, warm, dense forests are natures Petri dish) 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.  Bats are mammals, like us.  When the disease moves to larger animals, principally primates (humans also 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 outran 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.  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.  He came from Liberia by air.  There were no extraordinary precautions taken, and no red flags raised when he presented to medical professionals with flu-like symptoms.  I knew this day would come.  You can not have even a casual knowledge of the history of communicable disease without realizing that this would happen, just as it has.  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.  What we must fear is a politically correct instead of scientifically correct response.

The United Nations need to do something useful for a change.  It needs to quarantine Africa.  It needs to spend the money it wastes on diplomatic dinners and trappings of prestige and, instead, set up eight (or ten or twelve…whatever is manageable) sanctioned exit points from Africa.  In those places it needs to set up quarantine facilities at nice hotels with full food and medical facilities where anyone (anyone!) wanting to leave Africa will have to reside in relative isolation for the 3 weeks it takes for this disease to manifest itself.  The UN has the money to do this and hasn’t done a damn thing worth its mission in decades.  Let them finally step up for a good cause.   

Care for the ill and keep the faith.