Ebola: The Deadliest Outbreak Explained
When it comes to Ebola, the first thing you need to know is that dying from the virus is like something out of a horror movie--extremely painful and terrifying.
First, you get a fever; then uncontrollable diarrhea; then you begin hemorrhaging blood; and while all that's hitting you, you lose touch with reality and become delirious.
Finally, within days, you are dead. West Africa is currently in the midst of by far the worst case of the disease since it was first discovered in Africa back in 1976.
This year's outbreak has been traced to a two year old boy who died on December 6th, 2013 in a village in Guinea. He probably got the virus by eating contaminated food that had been drooled or defecated on by a bat, or - as is common in this part of the world - had eaten some bat for dinner. Bats, researchers believe, are the carriers of the disease. As if the two year old's death wasn't tragic enough, a week after it killed him, it killed his mother, his 3-year-old sister, and then his grandmother. Now, it's customary in some African villages to prepare a body for burial through the extremely sanitary cleansing ritual that involves evacuating the body all food and excreta, often using just bare hands.
Since the disease is spread by bodily fluids getting into the eyes, nose or mouth, it's no surprise that two people who travelled to the grandmother's funeral caught Ebola and brought it home to their villages. After escaping ground zero, the highly contagious, undetected virus was off to the races. By the end of March, Ebola had reached Liberia, and in June, the first case was reported in Monrovia, Liberia's capital city.
That's when outbreaks like this really start to spread, when the infected people make their way to population centers during the incubation phase, before their symptoms begin. A group of people from Sierra Leone who had travelled to an Ebola victim's funeral brought the disease back across the border, and in late July, the virus had hit Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are three of the 17 nations that form the Economic Community of West African States, whose combined territory is roughly half the land area of the United States, but with a population roughly the same - at 340,000,000 - it's about twice as dense as America. And since the disease is easily passed from person to person, and there are lots of people here, it's crucial to get outbreaks like this under control as quickly as possible, especially since a staggering 47% - or 2,984 - of the just over 6,400 people who have been sickened by this strain of Ebola have died. So understandably, this is terrifying to neighboring countries, who have responded by shutting down their borders.
Still, Nigeria - the largest country in Africa by population and economic output - couldn't keep the disease beyond its borders when an infected Liberian-American named Patrick Sawyer flew into Nigeria's largest city and died shortly thereafter.A Nigerian doctor named Stella Ameyo Adadevoh stopped Sawyer from leaving the hospital, stopping the spread of Ebola to the 21,000,000 people living in Lagos. Sadly, Dr. Adadevoh contracted Ebola and died, but she left this world a hero by helping to successfully limit the outbreak to just 21 cases and 8 deaths in her country. No new cases have been reported in Nigeria in weeks. Liberia's experience, however, has been the exact opposite.
The disease is out of control there. Cases doubled in the three weeks between August 31st and September 22. As a response, Liberia's Harvard-educated president - Nobel Peace Prize Winner Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (the first female head of state in the history of Africa) - had no choice but to order a lockdown of a highly-infected slum in the capital. This didn't last long though as an angry crowd attacked an Ebola center and freed the infected. The second hardest-hit country, Sierra Leone, has resorted to an unprecedented, three-day, nationwide lockdown of its 6 million residents in an effort to halt the disease.
But these countries are fighting an uphill battle. Many parts of West Africa lack even proper sanitation or drinking water. Too many people are poorly educated, scared, and mistrustful. To add insult to injury, aid workers keep getting attacked for spreading information about Ebola or trying to collect the bodies of the disease's victims. And in September, an entire team of eight aid workers was murdered by villagers in Guinea. When American health care workers in Liberia contracted the disease and had to be flown to the United States for life-saving treatment, the rest of the world was shaken by the possibility of Ebola spreading outside of Africa's borders. It was the first time an Ebola-infected person had stepped foot on American soil. But it wasn't the first time someone on western soil had been infected. In 1976, the year of the first documented Ebola outbreak, a British scientist named Geoffrey Platt, researching the disease in a lab in England, accidentally jabbed himself with a syringe containing the virus.
As the unmistakable symptoms of Ebola set in over the next few days, the British government acted swiftly. Platt was transported in a special ambulance under police escort to a London hospital where he was the lone patient. He was kept in an isolation chamber and all hospital staff working on his case were quarantined, as was his family and any lab workers and friends he had come in contact with. The extreme action worked, Platt recovered without infecting anyone else. But the current incarnation of Ebola is threatening to overwhelm the much more economically-challenged West African region. Answering the call to action, the United States military is taking the lead in overseeing and coordinating the response to the epidemic.
In addition to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff who Ebola have been there for weeks, President Obama has ordered 3,000 American troops to West Africa to build 17, 100-bed treatment centers and a site capable of training 500 health-care workers a week. The US response is worth an estimated $750 million over the next 6 months. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has alone donated $60 million, and the foundation of Paul Allen, Gates' co-founder of Microsoft, has given nearly $12 million. The American-led international response may come just in time, as infection levels were spiking exponentially in the middle of September. If no help had come, some experts were fearing the disease could have overwhelmed the region and spread until it exhausted its host population, killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of Africans, all the time increasing the odds that it could make its way off the continent. The World Health Organization now optimistically hopes to control Ebola by mid-2015, limiting the death-toll to around 10,000. Thanks for watching this installment of The Daily Conversation.
If you'd like us to tackle a particular subject in this mini-documentary format, leave your idea in a comment below. Until next time, I'm Bryce Plank.
