Sudan & hemmorhagic fever
Back when the first outbreak of Ebola occured in Zaire, a concurrent outbreak occured in the Sudan. I forget the exact numbers, feel too lazy to walk 10 feet to mybookcase & check but they weren't enormously high & both outbreaks had roughly similar case numbers. Sudan had a slightly lower mortality rate.
Ebola outbreaks have occured periodically since the first big outbreaks in the early 90s. Since then, a few more varieties have been identified. Ebola Tai or gabon - not sure of the official name at this moment; Ebola Reston...
The filoviruses - Marburg is the other species - are flat out... weird. No one had ever seen a similar structure in a virus. No one has ever seen a virus family with such a high lethality. Marburg kills a third of its victims & it's the 'easy' filovirus to recover from. Ebola Zaire, substrain Mayinga kills 94% of its victims.
Reston was a scary one - an airborne filovirus with almost 100% mortality among affected species of primates. It was a real toad to kill. 4 humans WERE infected - they showed antibodies but did not report verifiable illness due to Reston. It showed a capacity to infect humans without making them ill.
The scary bugbear is the possibility of a merge between Reston & Zaire/Mayinga in which a strain develops having airborne capabilities & the lethality of Mayonga. THAT could be a very close call for the human race. Luckily Ebola has 2 things working against it - okay, three. First, it's not a robust virus. Ultraviolet light & bleach kill it easily. Even an airborne version can be contained if folks working around wear respiratory protection. It doesn't like our climate it would seem - it's never broken out of Africa except for reston & there, it was contained indoors. Lastly, after several generations of infections it weakens & proportionately more people recover. That gives health types a chance to really lock down an area & cement solid medical procedures for tracing contacts & controlling it. Certainly if it's airborne that's a lot harder but the imposition of quarantines immediately would save most of the world's population - if it became airborne.
In years of searching the host species of these viruses have never been found & thousands of species have been sampled in many nations under many different conditions. It may have a very unusual life cycle or be a genetically engineered construct. We don't know at this point but the lack of findings in terms of a host species or more is puzzling. Not unprecedented, just puzzling for now.
There is a long list of infectious diseases & a great many of them have only been known a few decades. Many are re-emerging. Due to different circumstances Africa & the other countries containing tropical rain forest climates generate most of them.
Sudan had an outbreak last year in May as well:
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/askus..._BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1010,25413
***ACUTE HEMORRHAGIC FEVER - SUDAN (WESTERN EQUATORIA): SUSPECTED
**************************************************************
A ProMED-mail post
<
http://www.promedmail.org>
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
<
http://www.isid.org>
Sudan (Western Equatoria): suspected cases of acute hemorrhagic fever syndrome
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As of Mon 10 May 2004, WHO reported cases of acute hemorrhagic fever syndrome in Hai-Cuba, Yambio, Western Equatoria Region, southern Sudan. A rapid assessment team is in the field to investigate the situation. Clinical samples have been collected and preliminary results are expected soon.
--
Marianne Hopp
<mjhopp12@yahoo.com>
[This formal statement from WHO indicates that as yet there has been no resolution of the disease situation in southern Sudan. Reports of a similar outbreak in southern Sudan in May 2003 (see references below) similarly appears to have remained unresolved. - Mod.CP]
[see also:
2003
---
Undiagnosed disease - Sudan (south) (03) 20030513.1188
Undiagnosed disease - Sudan (south) (02) 20030510.1164
Undiagnosed disease - Sudan (south): RFI 20030509.1153]***
Checking the third update gives the most unsatisfactory answer that this story just... disappeared. It obviously wasn't Ebola or the story would have stayed 'live'. But what was it?
Here's an article dated today which gives answers to last year & raises some intriguing possibilities about this most recent outbreak:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1085142611249_215/?hub=Health
***Mystery Ebola-like illness in Sudan: WHO
Associated Press
NAIROBI, Kenya — Health authorities in southern Sudan have reported 15 cases, including four deaths, of a mystery illness similar to deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever, the World Health Organization said Friday.
WHO has sent a team of experts to Yambio, a Sudanese town near the border with northern Uganda, to investigate and monitor the outbreak. Laboratory tests by the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed an Ebola-like infection in 10 of the 15 cases, WHO said in a statement.
Dr. Abdullahi Ahmed, head of WHO's southern Sudan office, said that the preliminary tests indicate that the illness is in the "family of Ebola." But so far the death rate is lower than has previously been experienced with Ebola outbreaks, he added.
The symptoms of the illness around Yambio include general malaise, fever, vomiting blood and bloody diarrhea, Ahmed said.
Further tests are being carried out at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the results are expected over the weekend, he said.
The WHO statement said there had been no new cases reported for the last three days. The most recent case began on May 15.
Southern Sudan has been wracked by civil war since 1983; thousands of people are periodically displaced by fighting, and public health facilities are rare.
Last May, health experts identified a disease that killed 22 people in southern Sudan as yellow fever.
In 2000, an Ebola outbreak killed 173 people in Gulu district in northern Uganda.
The Ebola virus is spread by contact with body fluids, including sweat and saliva. Outbreaks of the disease are rare, and no one knows where the virus lives when it is not infecting humans. The disease usually kills its victims so fast that it also destroys the host for the virus.
Ugandan health officials said they had circulated warnings in areas that border Sudan and had put health workers on high alert.***
So currently 15 cases & 10 are 'confirmed' with an Ebola - like syndrome. With 10 of those dead, it certainly sounds as deadly as most of the other filoviruses. When tested, samples may have partially reacted to tests for known Ebola strains. In others, they may have shown they were related to known strains, yet somehow different. That strongly indicates a new species in the filovirus family. Not having been given the nature of the tests though - please understand I'm speculating.
If Ebola is meant to be a bioweapon, a lot of work remains to be done before it can be deemed suitable. It's too fragile in the environment. You need a reservoir species or a method to disseminate it in such a fashion as to hit all your chosen targets. Airborne is nice but you need to make this one a little less deadly so quickly - unless you want the inhabited world to be inhabited by a 'bio-soup' for some months - talk about messy.
You'd better come up with a vaccine or treatment, vaccine seems more likely & testing IS occuring. The areas where it's being tested are lousy test beds. Some are so remote, the epidemiology which would give bioweaponeers the data they need is bound to be incomplete - too many people with crucial facts may already be dead or have disappeared. Testing it in areas close to larger centers is highly risky.
Considerably more work needs to be done before this becomes an effective bioweapon in any sesne of the word - if that's what it is. But I doubt that. They would have had to create it in the late 50s - well before genetic engineering techniques were even dreamed of & why invent a whole new structure? It makes more sense to use known viral forms with known characteristics.
Frankly, it makes far more sense to simply tweak known pathogens that are easier to work with - no matter what your chosen final outcome.
