Guinea's Ebola outbreak: what is the virus and what's being done?

Guinea's Ebola outbreak: what is the virus and what's being done? | World news | theguardian.com

 Guinea's Ebola outbreak: what is the virus and
 what's being done?

 The medical aid charity Médecins sans Frontières warned this week that Guinea
 faces an Ebola epidemic “of a magnitude never before seen” as the nation’s
 president appealed for calm amid a rising death toll.

 Since January, Guinea health authorities have reported more than 150 suspected
 cases and nearly 80 deaths, scattered far across the country. The outbreak has
 led to travel alerts and thrust one of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases
 back into the spotlight.

 What is Ebola?

 "One of the most virulent viral diseases known to humankind", reads the WHO's
 alarming first sentence on Ebola, the group of five viruses with a case fatality
 ranging from 25-90% in humans. Ebola infects humans through direct contact
 with a sick person's (or animal's) blood or bodily fluids, or through contact with
 contaminated objects (such as needles and bedsheets). A "viral haemorrhagic
 fever", symptoms at first resemble those of a normal fever, infections spread
 quickly among family and friends caring for sick people, and then among medical
 staff who haven't confirmed the cause of sickness.
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 Unfortunately, the disease shares early symptoms with any number of other
 other illnesses, ranging from a passing fever to malaria, cholera and meningitis.
 Between two and 21 days, infected people might have red eyes and a rash, or
 suddenly experience "onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain and sore
 throat", "followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and liver
 function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding".

 The Ebola virus. Photograph: Frederick Murpy/CDC/EPA

 Contagion survives so long as the virus is in people's blood and secretions, and
 with no vaccine or specialized treatment, victims must simply try to beat the
 disease with "intensive supportive care" to fight off near constant dehydration.
 Ebola requires lab tests to confirm, and usually appears around tropical
 rainforests.

 Where is it?

 Guinea, the west African country with a sliver of land reaching the Atlantic, is the
 broad center of March's outbreak. On 23 March, authorities confirmed infections
 nationwide, from rural, southern towns to its capital, the port city of Conakry,
 where over two million people live. As doctors must quarantine the sick with
 extreme precaution, the wide range of infections could be disastrous. As of
 Monday, there have been 78 deaths from 122 suspected cases since January; the

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Guinea's Ebola outbreak: what is the virus and what's being done? | World news | theguardian.com

 nation's health ministry has confirmed 22 of those deaths as due to Ebola. It took
 six weeks for the ministry to confirm Ebola since suspected cases first appeared.

 There has only been one other reported outbreak of Ebola in west Africa, in Ivory Coast in 1994. Photograph:
 /Google

 On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia suspended visas for people from Guinea and Liberia.
 Senegal, to the north, has closed its borders. Liberia, to the south, has reported
 four deaths among seven suspected and confirmed cases. Sierra Leone, almost
 surrounded by Guinea's borders, reports five suspected cases, and has begun
 screening anyone who wants to cross the border. Reuters reports that the
 regional airline Gambia Bird has delayed service to Conakry, the capital. A
 coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières told the BBC that this could be "an
 epidemic of a magnitude never before seen". Liberia has warned people to stop
 having sex, kissing and shaking hands, and many people have taken to wearing
 gloves.

 What's being done?

 Without a vaccine or specific treatment, teams try to contain an outbreak
 immediately, meaning quarantine of sick people and the destruction or
 sterilization of anything that may be contaminated. Careful, standard practices –
 washing hands, wearing masks and gloves, clean gowns and safe injections – can

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Guinea's Ebola outbreak: what is the virus and what's being done? | World news | theguardian.com

 mean the difference between life and death.

 Medical staff must often wear full-body protection when helping the sick, who
 may be placed in containment tents. Preventing further infection may also mean
 culling and burning infected animals, restricting movement from towns and
 quickly burying the dead. In short, everything possible is done to reduce and
 limit contact between infected people and animals. Doctors' can treat infections
 that would complicate patient's condition, but they are otherwise limited to
 helping sick people stay hydrated and breathe healthily. The BBC reports that
 Guinea has banned the sale and eating of bats, which are often served in the
 country's southern forests.

 Besides efforts by national health ministries, several international groups,
 including the WHO and Doctors Without Borders, are helping investigate and
 respond. The CDC has issued a travel alert for Guinea, and the EU pledged
 €500,000 to fight the highly contagious disease.

 Where did Ebola come from?

 In 1976, the first known incidents of the disease broke out in two places
 simultaneously: one in Nzara, Sudan, and the other in the village of Yambuku,
 near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Where the disease
 survives between outbreaks, called its "reservoir", is not known, though fruit bats
 are a suspected "natural host". Humans have contracted the disease through
 contact with chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, pigs, bats and other mammals,
 especially those found dead.

 Ebola has periodically broken out in remote villages, all in Africa, with outbreaks
 in the DRC and Uganda as recently as 2012, and with death tolls reaching 187 in
 the DRC in 2007 and 224 in Uganda in 2000. Monkeys, imported to the US from
 the Philippines in the 1990s, were found to have a similar species of virus, and
 though several people were infected, none fell ill. (The dangers of a virus like
 Ebola were explored in the 1995 film Outbreak, in which an infected monkey is

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Guinea's Ebola outbreak: what is the virus and what's being done? | World news | theguardian.com

 set loose in America.)

 In labs in England and Russia there have been three total cases of contamination
 causing illness.

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