natgeo | The severity of this outbreak in West Africa reflects not
only the transmissibility of the disease, but also the sad circumstances
of poverty and the chronic lack of medical care, infrastructure, and supplies.
That's really what this is telling us: that we need to try harder to
imagine just what it's like to be poor in Africa. One of the
consequences of being poor in Africa, especially in a country like
Liberia or Sierra Leone, which have gone through a lot of political
turmoil and have weak governance and a shortage of medical resources, is
that the current outbreak could turn into an epidemic.
It's being spread because people are taking care of their
loved ones at home. They're touching them, they're feeding them, they're
washing them, they're cleaning up the vomit and the diarrhea that Ebola
generates. That's a classic circumstance in which even health care workers are getting infected.
In addition, there are burial practices that involve
washing the bodies and in some cases cleaning out the body cavities. In
some cases, the funeral practices also involve a final touch or even a
final kiss of the deceased person. And one of the things that's
particularly nefarious about Ebola is that it continues to live in a
dead person for some period of time after death. A person who's been
dead for a day or two may still be seething with Ebola virus. So funeral
practices can be a big factor in allowing it to be transmitted.
It's a combination of horrible circumstances. But the primary factor is poverty.
There's a cultural dimension to the way that
disease is interpreted in Africa, isn't there? A kind of standoff
between sorcery and science.
That's absolutely true. I know a little bit more about that
element among the ethnic peoples of central Africa than West Africa.
But in both regions there's a belief that these mysterious, invisible
plagues are caused by sorcery and evil spirits—what we might call
putting hexes on people.
There's a belief in some cultures that if a person
experiences good fortune in financial terms and does not share the good
fortune, when that person becomes ill with a mysterious fever and dies,
people tend to say: "Aha! It was because he didn't share. It was the
spirits who brought him down." There's also a belief in some cultures
that if someone doesn't share, another person will direct these evil
spirits to take that person down. There are a lot of different beliefs
from culture to culture that involve the idea of sorcery. And that just
adds to the confusion and the capacity for transmission.
When and where did Ebola first appear? (Belgian nuns with dirty needles in Yambuku!!!)
The first known outbreaks were in central Africa, in 1976:
one in Zaire, the country that's now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, and one in Sudan. The Zaire outbreak is the more famous. It began
in a place called Yambuku, a little mission town in north central
Zaire. People were suddenly dying with these horrible symptoms, but
nobody knew what it was. An international team led by Karl Johnson went
in, and it was this team that first isolated and identified the virus.
They named it after a nearby river, the Ebola River.
