Word: ebola
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...with at least 15,000 technicians working daily on the world's deadliest pathogens - the vast majority of them for the first time. Though FBI background checks are required for people who handle so-called select agents - a government-drawn list of 73 highly lethal pathogens, such as Ebola, ricin and monkeypox - the vetting focuses on security, not bio-safety competence. Yet most lab accidents are due to simple human error, says Dr. Gigi Gronvall, Senior Associate at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh. Newbies to the lab are typically indoctrinated to safe lab habits through...
KAMPUNG Doctors work to contain Congo's Ebola outbreak...
...People always assumed it was the same for gorillas," says Walsh. This belief made particular sense since gorillas live in relatively compact packs that don't interact much with other packs. Ebola, however, is oddly aggressive in great apes, ignoring pack boundaries and advancing across great-ape habitats at a rate of about 29 miles a year. Heading into the field to study the outbreaks, as well as animal behavior that could be contributing to them, Walsh and his team soon cracked the mystery...
...turns out that animal epidemiologists had based all their Ebola assumptions on mountain gorillas--the kind studied by Dian Fossey--and not on Western gorillas, which were actually dying. The mountain variety subsists mostly on leaves, which are available all over the forest. Western gorillas, by contrast, live mostly on fruit, a scarcer resource that draws different groups of gorillas and chimpanzees to the same trees at different times of day. "They defecate and urinate in and around the trees," says Walsh, leaving infected body fluids to sicken the next group. Gorillas also examine the bodies of dead apes they...
...that the mechanics of the epidemic are known, putting the brakes on it could be comparatively easy. Ebola vaccines exist, but public-service announcements won't exactly bring gorillas to a vaccination center where the entire population can be inoculated. Instead, epidemiologists can use selective-vaccination techniques, which work with human communities when universal vaccination isn't practical. Just inoculate a few gorilla groups along the infection chain, and when the virus reaches them, it is stopped cold...