Researcher says Ebola Unlikely to Spread in US - 'This is a virus that does not easily spread from one human to another. It requires contact, direct contact with bodily fluids. We should be more worried for the people in West Africa.'

From [HERE] Though Ebola is unlikely to gain a substantial foothold in the United States, even after the first U.S. diagnosis of an Ebola case this week, author David Quammen argues that our common humanity calls on us to help the people of West Africa. The virus has killed more than 3,400 people there and infected thousands more, according to the World Health Organization, and continues to spread at an out-of-control rate. (Related: "Ebola Questions You Were Afraid to Ask.")

Talking from his home in Montana, Quammen, author of Ebola: The Natural and Human History, describes how he first encountered the story of the disease over a campfire in Gabon; how sorcery and science are often at loggerheads in West Africa; and why we should try to imagine ourselves confronting the dire poverty that many Africans face.

How worried should we be about this first case of Ebola in the U.S.?

We should not be worried for ourselves. We should be more worried for the people in West Africa. This is a virus that does not easily spread from one human to another. It requires contact, direct contact with bodily fluids. It can be stopped with good hospital conditions and barrier nursing, meaning masks, goggles, rubber gloves, etc. (In photo, Hazmat teams descended on apartments where Thomas Duncan had stayed on disinfect items including his car). 

There is only the slimmest likelihood that it can escape that containment in the U.S. There's a far greater chance that we'll die of influenza in the next year than that we'll die of Ebola virus. But we should still be very concerned for what's going on in West Africa.

I suppose the next question is: Why are people in West Africa touching bodies or getting bodily fluids on each other? How is it spreading there? And why?

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 [which is caused by white supremacy/racism].

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?

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.

You write that "every newly emerging disease begins with a mystery." What's the riddle behind Ebola?

There are a couple of mysteries. The main one is: Where does it live when it's not killing humans? In other words, what is its reservoir host? What kind of creature living in the African forest harbors this virus in a chronic, inconspicuous, but permanent way? Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

But after 38 years since the first outbreak, scientists have yet to identify for certain what the reservoir host of Ebola is. It is suspected that at least one of its reservoir hosts is a fruit bat. Antibodies to Ebola have been found, but no one has ever isolated live Ebola virus from a fruit bat or from any other creature. So we still don't know where this thing lives. And until we do, we can't foresee or forestall further outbreaks. [MORE]