Word: ebola
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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...
...farther into the tropical rain forests of Africa and South America, the world's great reservoirs of microbial horrors, they come into contact with diseases that have been circulating among animals probably for centuries. And while diseases have been jumping from animals to humans throughout history (hantavirus, AIDS and Ebola are only three recent examples), it was not until this century that the bugs could take advantage of jet-age transportation to leave the jungle and travel to hundreds or thousands of people...
...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...