Ebola Haemmorhagic Fever

[andy]

Can anyone give me details on this- Mortality rates, areas found, how it is passed from human to human etc?

[Rakdos]

Read Hot Zone By Richard Preston it Gives the needed info

[SubJunk]

There are a lot of different strains of ebola, the most common is Ebola Zaire, coming from a place called Zaire in Africa.

It can be passed along in many ways depending which strain it is. The Mayinga strain, for example, is airborne. However it isn't as much of an epidemic as you would think, its own efficiency is in fact its own downfall.

Ebola isn't very good at surviving outside of a host (5-15 minutes is the estimate in conditions such as those in Africa) so it's extremely lucky it's an African disease because in the cases when the Mayinga strain does get out, it usually kills the entire village quite quickly, which is of course a tragedy for them but there's such a distance between villages that it usually stops there.

If it ever got into a densely populated area... I shudder to think what would happen.

Some interesting things about Ebola... Essentially, it turns your whole body into liquid. Your eyes "melt", internal organs do too, until they become somewhat like a water-bomb with very thin casing. Often during autopsy, upon removal of an organ it will just collapse into liquid regardless of how careful they are about handling it.

I believe it has about a 95% mortality rate, but may be wrong (correct me)

Takes roughly a week to die, however sometimes 4 days and sometimes 2 weeks (which is when euthanasia would come in handy)

[Spaceman]

Read Hot Zone[/u'] By Richard Preston it Gives the needed info

Excellent reading,it goes into all the gory details and frightens you for some weeks when there's some guy coughing near you in the town centre

[Ophiolite]

Hot Zone is a good read, but somewhat sensationalised. If I recall correctly it has a small bibligraphy, which could be handy.

 

This

Ebola and Marburg viruses are responsible for well-documented outbreaks of severe human hemorrhagic fever with resultant case mortality rates ranging from 23% for Marburg virus (Marburg, Germany; 1967) to 88% for Ebola virus (Yambuku, Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]; formerly Zaire; 1976).

is from here:

http://www.emedicine.com/MED/topic626.htm

 

I suggest you may also wish simply to google for [ebola "mortality rates"]

[andy]

Thanks for all the replies guys

[UCF-Forensic]

HOTZONE is a good book, also try "The Demon in the freezer" if you need info on smallpox.

[Drug addict]

Hotzone is a pretty decent book, though as Ophi said it is a bit sensationalised. A couple of other good books are 'The Coming Plague' by Laurie Garrett (1994 so a bit old now, but has information about a whole host of diseases including ebola, lassa fever, toxic shock syndrome and AIDS, and ha s ahuge bibliography), and 'Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC' by J. McCormick & S. Fisher-Hoch, which is a bit more recent than Garrett (1996).