Word: ebola
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fast forward to February 1996, when officials at the World Health Organization's Geneva headquarters got word of a possible Ebola-virus outbreak in the remote village of Mayibout, Gabon. It is hard to imagine a more frightening report: ever since the first known outbreak in 1976, the virulent Ebola virus has been near the top of every Central African's list of the worst ways to die. With the 1994 publication of the best seller The Hot Zone, that fear had gone global. The symptoms--catastrophic hemorrhaging, bloody diarrhea and the literal disintegration of one organ after another--were...
Then came nature's counterattack: in one wave after another, HIV, Ebola, Marburg virus, Lassa fever, Legionnaire's disease, hantavirus, hepatitis C--in all, at least 30 newly identified pathogens over the past two decades--swooped down upon different population groups. Most of them came out of the newly inhabited and exploited rain forests of Africa and South America, making an inter-species jump from animals to humans...
...ways. Geographers point to a climate that ranges from the burning Sahara to the steamy rain forests of Zaire to the dry savannas of Kenya. Biologists note the astonishing abundance and variety of the continent's wildlife. Epidemiologists speak with horror and fascination of deadly viruses like HIV and Ebola that have come out of the jungle, and of countless undiscovered microbes waiting to emerge...
...little hard information to share. No one is sure exactly how the disease gets started, how it spreads so easily, why it zeroes in on rainbows or how it can be stopped. "Our data base is almost zero," says Karl Johnson, a virologist who spearheaded the search for the Ebola virus, and is helping to lead this effort. "There are unanswered questions everywhere...
...Ebola Reston, by contrast, has never been linked to illness in humans. Still, doctors are closely monitoring everybody who had any contact with the monkeys in Texas. Experts warn that they can't rule out the possibility that Ebola Reston could mutate into a strain that is fatal to humans. Says a spokesman for the cdc: "It would be folly to predict what the virus will...