Epidemic

A Deadly Virus

The Ebola virus, first discovered in 1976 near the Congo River in Africa, is one of the deadliest germs ever seen. In most outbreaks, Ebola kills 90% of the people it infects. As the virus replicates in human victims, it causes high fever, vomiting, diarrhea and oozing discharges from the eyes and nose. Ebola needs just the smallest of entry points to spread to a new victim: It can penetrate mucous membranes and small scrapes on the skin.

In the decades after the virus was discovered, Ebola outbreaks were confined to remote parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Gabon and Uganda. Victims tended to die so quickly, they didn’t have time to travel far enough to spread the disease to new locales. Thus, once the disease had claimed all the denizens of a small village, it had nowhere else to go, and the outbreak fizzled out. Immunologists were left to imagine what might happen if Ebola arrived in a large city – and to feel fortunate that the disease had remained a rural scourge rather than an urban blight. Meanwhile, public fear of the disease was sparked, briefly, by the 1994 bestseller The Hot Zone, ...