1. seed
  2. Threatening Zoonoses

Threatening Zoonoses

By milhayser on August 27, 2012.

Filovirus Entry by AJ Cann

Two weeks after an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, the same disease is circulating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But the outbreaks have been caused by two distinct subtypes of virus, meaning they were not spread from one country to the other. The same thing happened in 1976, when over 500 people died in the two regions, hundreds of miles apart. Tara C. Smith asks, “Is this just coincidence that Ebola has twice now broken out in two different places at the same time, but with different viral subtypes?” If not, and specific environmental or ecological conditions are triggering these outbreaks, then science may someday be able to predict or prevent them. Meanwhile, on Life Lines, Dr. Dolittle reports that an arenavirus common to rodents has been observed in snakes for the first time, causing them to “to stare off into space, appear like they were drunk and even tie themselves into knots they could not escape."

Tags
Misc

More like this

Ebola: Back in the DRC
August, 1976. A new infection was causing panic in Zaire. Hospitals became death zones, as both patients and medical staff succumbed to the disease. Reports of nightmarish symptoms trickled in to scientists in Europe and the US, who sent investigators to determine the cause and stem the epidemic.…
Snakes and Ebola
Image from: National Geographic, photograph by Joel Sartore In 2009, scientists at the California Academy of Sciences Steinhart Aquarium discovered some of the snakes suffering from a strange illness that caused them to stare off into space, appear like they were drunk and even tie themselves…
Ebola reemerges from the forest
Ebola has surfaced again. After a hiatus of over a year without any new identified outbreaks, the virus has reemerged in western Africa, in the first-ever multi-country outbreak of the Zaire strain of Ebola. As of this writing, there have been 122 suspected cases of the disease in Guinea (24…
New (as yet unnamed) Ebola strain found in Uganda
Since its discovery, only a few countries have really been affected by Ebola. The virus has surfaced multiple times in the Democractic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, in Gabon, and now in Uganda. This country was last hit (and hit hard) by Ebola in 2000, when an outbreak there caused at least 425…