Viral Hemorrhagic Fever :: science

Viral Hemorrhagic Fever How would you like it if you died? Well that’s what’s happening to people in Africa. Their families die around them, spreading the deadly disease further into the ecosystem. Killing at will, this potent filovirus sweeps through villages with reckless abandon, destroying anything and everything in it’s way, and then just as mysteriously as it came, it disappears without a trace. Even with our modern technologies, we still don’t really know too much about this death sentence disguised as a virus. In the following, I will do my best to teach you about Ebola, its cousins, where it’s from, possible cures, effects, and so on. If we want to, we can find a cure. We control our destiny, and it’s up to us to find an anecdote to this killing machine. The Ebola virus is a highly contagious filovirus that can be transmitted by re-use of unsterilized syringes, needles, and directly transferring it by contact of bodily fluids that contain high levels, or "bricks" of virus. Aerosol transmission cannot be counted out, but water vapor containing secretions of Ebola are known to spread the infection. Seeing that Ebola can be spread in numerous ways, including being spread from animal to human, and visa-versa, monkey handlers who work with Ebola ridden monkeys have broken out with the infamous hemorragic fever. The animal-to-human spread of the virus has also killed off African tribes that eat animals with high titers of the deadly virus. Ebola is an infectious disease of many faces. It has strains, such as Mayinga, or Cardinal, which are mainly named after people, or places that they are discovered in. Strains are slightly different versions of a certain virus. Ebola’s three types that are known are: Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, and Ebola Reston. Ebola Zaire was first discovered in 1976 in Zaire. It is the deadliest disease of all of the Ebola strains with a 9 out of 10 kill rate (see fig. 1-1). Ebola Sudan kills over 1/2 of the people it comes in contact with. It was discovered in 1976 also. Ebola Reston was named after Reston, Virginia, which had a shipment of cynomolgus macaques, a type of monkey, infect a whole monkey house with Ebola. Ebola Reston has never killed anyone, but it killed 80% of the monkeys that it devastated. Ebola also has a very close cousin, Marburg. Under an electron microscope, they are clearly filoviradae.