About Ebola

History
Ebola, or Ebola Virus Disease, first recognized in 1976 in Zaire, Democratic Republic of Congo. It was co-discovered by Peter Piot. Piot sent a blood sample from an infected nun when he could not identify what was causing her illness. Once the viron was identified, Piot returned to Zaire where he and his team were instrumental in halting the disease after three months and three hundred deaths.

Signs and Symptoms
Ebola is not infectious unless the human host is displaying symptoms of the infection. Those symptoms include fever, headache, sore muscles and joints, and sore throat. As the illness progresses, the host can then display vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach pain.

In rarer instances Ebola disease can cause rashes, red eyes, hiccups, and internal & external bleeding.

If an exposed person contracts the disease symptoms will become apparent after two to twenty-one* days. After the twenty-one day incubation period, if no symptoms are present, then the person being watched is not at risk of contracting or displaying the symptoms of Ebola.

Transmission Vectors
A vector is an intermediate source or host to the virus. A vector is typically an animal that humans come into contact with. Initially, it was thought that Ebola was contracted by eating gorilla meat procured in the wild. It is now thought that bats carry the virus, without being affected by it, and that "bush meat" in the form of wild caught gorilla that have come into contact with bat droppings is the true source of the viron.

Other animals that can serve as vectors include chimpanzee, gorilla, forest antelope, and monkey all of which can have or might have eaten items laced with bat droppings.

Once a human has become infected and is displaying symptoms, others can contract the disease from the sufferer via bodily fluids. This includes, blood, sweat, tears, saliva, snot, and runny stool. Semen also contains the viron, where it seems to linger the longest.

Those at highest risk of contracting the disease are health workers who tend to those already infected.

* Piot found that if people exposed to the virus did not display symptoms after fifteen days, they were not going to contract the disease. An additional seven days was added to be safe.

From 1976 until the date at the top of this article, there have been approximately four thousand cases of Ebola Virus Disease with twenty-four hundred fatalities. Most of these have occurred in poorer regions of Africa where health care can be sub-standard to non-existent.

Many of the cases contracted in Africa came about when family members prepared their dead for burial by washing and preparing the body of the deceased. It is also a virtual certainty that EVD can be contracted from tainted bush meat.

Since 1976, over four thousand people have contracted EVD, four hundred of which are health care workers. Of the four hundred health care workers, two hundred thirty-three have died.That's a fatality rate approaching 60%.

According to the World Health Organization, this is likely due to limited funds for equipment, improper use of protective equipment that is available, not enough trained medical personnel, and long working hours in isolation wards.

Survivors of the disease carry antibodies which help the immune system recognize and fight off the disease.

Survivors are often encouraged to aid in health-care work due to their immunity. Plasma from these survivors has helped other infected people fight off the disease if given early enough. However that plasma must match the blood-type of the afflicted.

To date, the best means of fighting off the Ebola virus is from antibodies derived from the plasma of an Ebola survivor. However, this means that the patient receiving the plasma must be the same blood-type as the donor. So far, every patient receiving plasma has fought off the virus rapidly and successfully.

Though a vaccine that cleared Ebola from apes and monkeys was created nearly two years ago, the vaccine was never tested on humans due to funding limitations. This lack of funding, in turn, was likely due to the fact that the disease had not yet made it to the United States until this year. In the last month (October 2014) there have been renewed efforts to mount human trials for this vaccine.

See Ebola Vaccine for News

Transmission is not possible unless the infected person is showing symptoms. Ebola spreads only through direct contact with body fluids. A cough from a sick person could infect someone who has been sprayed with saliva particularly if that saliva lands in the other person's eye, is inhaled, lands in an open cut or wound, or lands in the mouth.

Emory University Hospital in Atlanta also found that the viron is present on the surface of the skin of the afflicted once that person develops symptoms. Touching the sweat of a victim and then touching the mouth or other opening is enough to transfer the viron.

The Centers for Disease Control found that the virus can remain viable, and infectious, for a two or three hour period on dry surfaces like doorknobs, telephones, sink handles, and counter-tops. It can survive for two to three days in the wet environment of standing water.

Bleach solutions and ultra violet rays (sunlight) can kill the virus. This is true for all viruses.

There are many reasons, not the least of which is the relative "newness" of the disease. The viron that causes EVD is quite large at fourteen hundred nanometers in length and seventy to ninety nanometers in diameter. Compare this to seventy to eighty nanometers for the rhino-virus, (the common cold) and Ebola Virus is quite large.

Every external part of an Ebola viron can attach to a cell. Because Ebola is so large it presents much more surface area to a cell, where it attaches and then invades the cell. Once invasion is complete the virus uses cell components to reproduce thus weakening or killing the infected cell. It then breaks out of the infected cell, and moves through the blood stream to infect other cells.

For this reason, rapid, whole body infection, happens quickly. In some cases, at the time of death, the infected individual can have as many as a billion Ebola virons per cubic centimeter of blood. Compare this to an HIV infection which may have as many as a billion viron particles in the five point five liters (5,500 centimeters) of blood.

EVD attacks all cells in the body, but can (depending on the patient) have an affinity for liver cells, the cells that line and seal blood vessels, and the cells that form muscles.

As with all diseases, EVD can affect different people different ways depending on an individual's overall health and immune response. EVD may attack the cell lining of blood vessels including arteries. For these people, symptoms include bleeding from the mouth, eyes, and intestines. For people so affected, EVD causes blood to seep through those vessels into surrounding tissues. The result is pink or blood red whites of the eyes, bloody mouth, and blood in urine and stool. For this reason EVD was originally called Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever.

Only a small percentage of the infected respond this way. But looking for the presence of blood in the whites of the eye, in the mouth, or in urine or stool is one possible way to make an early diagnosis. For most others, "flu-like" symptoms are the best indicator.

The following paragraphs compare EVD to HIV, a disease Americans know considerably more about.

Mutation
HIV mutates rapidly. A single patient with HIV may have as many as four versions of the virus when he or she finally succumbs. This indicates that HIV can change and evolve fairly easily within the infected body.

Ebola Virus, from Bumba, Republic of Congo, has remained unchanged after nineteen years. For this reason it is highly unlikely that Ebola will transform into an airborne viron.

Transmission
HIV is transmitted via sexual contact, blood, and breast milk.

Ebola is transmitted through body fluids.

Latency
Latency is the time between contracting a virus and displaying symptoms.

HIV can infect a host and remain dormant for up to ten years with no outward signs of infection detectable.

Ebola has almost no latency with sufferers displaying symptoms no later than twenty-one days after exposure and as soon as two days after. In fact, most Ebola sufferers displayed signs of infection within twelve days of contact with an infected individual. The twenty-one day period is the longest period observed by any health professional and is rare. No one, to date, has gone longer than the twenty-one day period from exposure and come down with symptoms or the disease.

This article is subject to frequent changes as more Ebola information becomes available.

Information obtained through the Centers for Disease Control and The World Health Organization unless otherwise noted.

November 17, 2014

Updated list of Ebola patients in the U.S. with Dr. Martin Salia who was admitted to Nebraska Medical Center on November 15th and died in the early morning hours of November 17th. This death changes the statistical probability of death and that change is reflected at twenty percent lethality.