HIGHWAY VIRUS

Why Ebola is back in the news?

Few years back (1995) my friend and I were skipping the pages of latest foreign medical journals in our Ispat general library of Rourkela, when my friend brought my attention to an article “The super highway virus”. The article discussed mostly on how new virus would invade mankind, kill them ruthlessly till they compromise with the host and become less virulent. With best of our efforts we simply cannot eradicate viruses as they too are as old as this universe. Starting from smallpox until this Ebola outbreak one can conclude that we should never be complacent about eradication of a particular virus because something new would appear in its place. There are many factors which are responsible for spread of the virus. Technology has taken over the mankind and we feel proud to have conquered the moon, the mars, deep sea and many more. But viruses are a very intelligent and they modify themselves to escape from our immune system. The rapid transport system, changing the eating habits, sex perversions and environment change has lead to these super highway viral diseases. That’s why Albert Einstein once said “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots”

Ebola virus tends to come and go over time. The viruses are constantly circulating in animals, birds and most likely bats. Every once in a while, the disease spills over into humans, often when someone handles or eats undercooked or raw meat from a diseased ape, monkey, or bats. An outbreak can then happen for several months. And then it becomes quiet again. Ebola can completely disappear from humans for years at a time. For example, there were zero recorded cases of Ebola in 2005 or 2006.

Ebola is both rare and very deadly. Since the first outbreak in 1976, Ebola viruses have infected thousands of people and killed about one-third of them. Symptoms can come on very quickly and kill fast: Ebola is more inimical to humans than perhaps any known virus on Earth, except rabies and HIV-1. And it does its damage much faster than either.     

                  Liberia is one of several countries battling the current outbreak, which is unprecedented both in the number of cases and in its geographic scope. It's now hit four countries: Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia have been joined by Nigeria, which this week saw its first case, after an infected Liberian man flew to the Nigerian city of Lagos, which is also Africa's largest city. There are also fears the disease has spread to the country of Togo, where that man's flight had a stopover. And the virus — which starts off with flu-like symptoms and often ends with horrific hemorrhaging — had as of July 23 infected 1,201 people in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and killed an estimated 672 since this winter, according to the World Health Organization.

So what we can do to prevent its spread? Quarantine the persons coming from African countries and we must tell our travelers not to venture out of India at this moment without any purpose. Pleasure trips can wait but Ebola virus would not wait to attack us. The sign and symptoms are like any viral illness with bleeding tendency and high death rates (80 to 90%) closely mimicking Dengue hemorrhagic fever. There is no treatment except for treating the symptoms.

Sanjoy Kumar Satpathy,

Ex. Faculty for SARC countries, for infectious diseases.