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Posted on 12/07/2006 2:10:41 PM PST by Zakeet
An outbreak of Ebola virus in northwestern Republic of Congo has killed 5,000 gorillas, helping to push the threatened species even closer to extinction, a study says.
The estimate is made by a team of scientists in Europe and central western Africa, who say there was a "massive die-off" of gorillas in Congo's Lossi Sanctuary park from 2002 to 2004.
The great apes which died were western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), one of two gorillas species.
The other species is the eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei).
"The Lossi outbreak killed about as many gorillas as survive in the entire eastern gorillas species," laments the paper, carried in Friday's issue of the US journal Science.
But the death toll is probably only a "small fraction" of gorillas likely to have been killed by Ebola in the past decade, it says.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
OK, I'm game.. how is this Bush's fault?
"Gorilla gorilla"? Does that sound like the name of a rock group or what??
Run the numbers, my BS detector just went off.
?
I guess could be.
If it weren't for Bush's partial repeal of the estate tax, we could fully funded Clinton's NIH Ebola Initiative that would have wiped out Congolese Ebola by 2002. Bush's fault.
Hey, these "monkey meat" critters are carriers. The more that die of it, the better.
Que?
Wonder how they got such an accurate account....1 gorilla..2 gorilla, surely a proper burial with rites was preformed..
Very good. Six degrees of Bush's Fault. Fun game.
They're not hosts. If they were ebola hosts they wouldn't be dying. Bats are probably the host.
IIRC, anytime there is a human outbreak of Ebola, it is because they eat monkey meat.
Not true. You can catch ebola from coming into contact with infected monkeys and apes (for the record, gorillas aren't monkeys) just as you can get infected from coming into contact with infected humans. However the host reservoir is almost certainly not a primate, and is most likely a bat.
This is just another day in Darwinian Evolution.
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