Word: ebola
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Officials tightened their blockade of Kikwit and four other towns amid reports of people bribing police to let them out of thequarantine area where the deadly Ebola virus has been identified. At least 86 people have been killed so far by the virus. In Kinshasa, a nurse who fled the containment zone was placed in isolation as medical personnel tried to determine whether she is infected. Police had spent most of the day looking for the nurse and a riverboat captain who had travelled to Zaire's capital from Kikwit. The captain was found not to be infected and released...
...more towns. In an effort to keep the virus from spreading beyond the four afflicted towns to Kinshasa, the capital 370 miles to the west, officials tried to close all road, river and air routes out of the affected area. The World Health Organization maintains that the nature of Ebola does not require such drastic measures, since the virus kills within a few days, preventing carriers from spreading it very widely. TIME science writer Lawrence Mondi says WHO is showing appropriate caution, noting that the number of deaths caused by the virus may be smaller than originally thought. "There...
...quite. They--or, rather, producer Arnold Kopelson--read it in a New Yorker article in 1992. "Crisis in the Hot Zone," Richard Preston's true story about the near escape of the Ebola virus from a Virginia lab, threw Hollywood into a bidding frenzy, and Kopelson was one of the pursuers. When Preston sold his rights to 20th Century Fox, Kopelson decided to make a fictional plague film, Outbreak. It scurried into production while the Hot Zone project dithered in development and then aborted. So if you want to see a virus epic, Outbreak...
Scientists believe Ebola virus made just that kind of jump, from monkeys into humans; so did other African viruses such as Marburg and the mysterious X that broke out in Sudan. And many more are likely to emerge. "In the Brazilian rain forest," says Dr. Robert Shope, a Yale epidemiologist, "we know of at least 50 different viruses that have the capacity of making people sick. There are probably hundreds more that we haven't found...
Viruses like Ebola and X are scary, but they're too deadly to be much of a threat to the world. Their victims don't have much of a chance to infect others before dying. In contrast, HIV, the AIDS virus -- which may have come from African primates as early as the 1950s -- is a more subtle killing machine, and thus more of an evolutionary success. An infected person will typically carry HIV for years before symptoms appear. Thus, even though HIV doesn't move easily from one human to another, it has many chances to try. Since the first...