Four Ebola cases confirmed in Guinea's capital

AFP via Yahoo! News ^ | 3/27/2014 | Mouctar Bah

[Pan_Yan]

Conakry (AFP) - An Ebola epidemic which has killed dozens of people in Guinea's southern forests has spread to the capital Conakry, health sources said on Thursday, confirming four new cases.

The patients were immediately put in isolation centres to avoid the highly contagious virus getting into the population, the sources told AFP.

Conakry, a vast, sprawling port city on Guinea's Atlantic coast, is home to between 1.5 million and two million people.

Aid organisations have sent dozens of workers to help the impoverished country combat a haemorrhagic fever outbreak which has claimed at least 66 lives, according to a government toll released late Thursday. Many of the victims have been confirmed to have been infected by Ebola.

Ebola had never spread among humans in west Africa before February but five deaths being investigated in Liberia, one in Sierra Leone and others still being tested could bring the total in the epidemic to above 70.

[Pan_Yan]

Apparently an elderly man got infected in the rural area where the outbreak started then returned to Conakry where he died. All four of his brothers contracted the virus at the funeral.

Now it's wait and see if they infected more people before being isolated.

[ronnie raygun]

There was a suggestion that Al quida operatives were seen in the area interested in it’s gift and how they can use it

[RegulatorCountry]

I’d understood that ebola outbreaks, scary and rapidly fatal as they are, burn out pretty quickly precisely because of this rapid fatality. The man’s brothers contracted it at his funeral? How long had he been dead? Is there some sort of customary handling of or contact with the the corpse? The virus should not survive very long past death.

[dforest]

I thought they burned the bodies right after death.

[Pan_Yan]

The problem with weaponizing it is the same problem as curing it. It burns out too fast to do any real work on it. It’s a terrifying disease and yet has only killed 1500 people in 40 years.

[edpc]

Probably wouldn’t take much if they got a few people to travel through large airports.

[RegulatorCountry]

They should, if contracting the virus is possible.

[TBall]

I think the problem with Ebola is that it could mutate into a more dangerous form that is not so quick to burn out.

[Mercat]

12 Monkeys comes to mind.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Playing around with dead bodies is a major contributor to the spread of ebola. While it is ritually done in many places in Africa, the custom usually evaporates when ebola shows up.

[edpc]

True. I was speaking more from personal experience, as I came down with a pretty nasty case of Influenza B while traveling. There would be some difficulty, since flu and ebola have different incubation/contagious timeframes.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

There are several limiting factors about ebola that make it an unlikely candidate for a serious epidemic.

The first is that it is blood borne, not pulmonary, spread by coughing and sneezing. Proper hygiene severely limits contact contamination.

Second is that ebola only mutates about 100 times slower than influenza, so the different current strains diverged perhaps a thousand years ago.

Third is that the entryway into humans is now though to be from eating undercooked bats. So don’t do this. Guinea quickly put out the warning to people to stop eating them, as well as rats.

[edpc]

Any word on whether it matters if the bats are maple or ash?

[Pan_Yan]

I understand the dangers but you have no idea how hard it is to cut undercooked bats out of your diet once your hooked.

Joking aside I've seen several articles call them a local delicacy.

[VanShuyten]

I had some bat curry in Sulawesi. Chewy, but good.

[bravo whiskey]

Probably wouldn’t take much if they got a few people to travel through large airports.

Tom Clancy Executive Orders

[TBall]

I found your post to be a relief, but I wish it would just burn out already.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Truthfully, biologically speaking many pathogens are natural controls on animal, and human, populations. While people have had some success in holding epidemics back for the last about 70 years, it has just insured that when they do punch through our defenses, a lot more people are going to die.

By far, the worst threat is Influenza, and by all appearances H5N1 showed (and still shows) prospects for becoming the most lethal epidemic in human history. And why it has not accomplished easy human to human transmission is a great mystery.

Ebola could naturally only produce a very limited epidemic, outside of 3rd and 4th world nations, because modern nations have the infrastructure to halt it in its tracks. A combination of quarantine, personal and clinical hygiene and sanitation, and a population that generally understands infectious diseases, make it extremely hard for a gigantic epidemic here.