If you believed the media, Ebola is a real and present danger down in Dorset, just like global warming. Watching the nightly 19:30 Ebola Report on the BBC News Channel you’d be forgiven for thinking that someone flying in from Liberia to Bristol could easily cause thousands of people in Dorchester to keel over with haemhoraggic fever in the streets, spewing and shitting their infectious blood everywhere…
Reading the some news articles about Ebola you hit upon some really quite scary assumptions and there is widespread fear of an outbreak. In countries with developed healthcare systems we aren’t that likely to be walking down the street with thousands haemorrhaging blood and dying around us. Ebola is too easily contained in areas such as the US and EU.
Let us look at the scary stuff first and then assess the facts.
Scary rubbish
Reading initial reports of the outbreak you may have come to the belief that Ebola can be transmitted through air droplets – perhaps someone with the illness coughing on a plane. This isn’t possible. Nor is it going to infect its way around the globe like flu does. Infected people might fly to another country but even in Nigeria where an infected US man flew, it has been rapidly contained.
You may have read that Ebola has a 90% kill rate. In jungle communities with poor health infrastructure, it does. Where the illness is identified and tackled quickly, Ebola might only kill 50% of victims.
How does it infect?
- Don’t eat fruit bats! According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Ebola is carried by fruit bats though they don’t develop the illness. Fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are considered delicacies by people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. This is why the illness does so well in the area.
- Sexual transmission. Ebola requires someone to share their bodily fluids in order to be transmitted. This isn’t unlike HIV AIDS.
- Don’t touch their bodily fluids. Again, this is because when they develop the haemorrhagic fever phase of the illness, everything they cough up, spew, pee, shit or bleed out is going to be infected. This can be dangerous in two ways – someone treating the infected person can come into contact with the disease. Those preparing the body for burial will risk contact with it.
What happens if you’re infected?
According to the WHO website, people with Ebola will get “sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding. Laboratory findings include low white blood cell and platelet counts and elevated liver enzymes.”
Treatments
There is no cure or vaccination available for Ebola.
According to the WHO, victims become very dehydrated. Giving them fluids with electrolytes to keep up their strength often helps them fend off the illness. This is why, properly treated your chances of survival go up from 1 in 10 to 1 in 2.
Why is it so bad in the countries of the outbreak?
In a jungle environment with a poor healthcare infrastructure, families are more likely to tend their loved ones and bury them when they die. Ill educated on the subject they do as anyone would try to do for their loved one – clean up their spew, shit and blood while mopping their brow and keeping them comfortable. This is a guaranteed way to get sick yourself. In these cultures, modern medicine is expensive and held in some distrust. Families don’t go to the doctor if someone is sick.
Locals rightly observe that the centres of the illness are often around healthcare centres and hospitals. They also see doctors and nurses dying. This doesn’t help their mistrust in medical staff! Hospitals are where sick people go, and even in Western countries we see people going into hospital with one illness and dying from another they contract in hospital. Despite scare stories around MRSA we still fundamentally trust medical staff. People who have had little or no contact react to what they see – people get horrible illnesses there. They blame the authorities as a result. This is why reporting and containment is so difficult.
Why are we relatively safe?
In the US and EU, where someone has a flu that isn’t responding to treatment they will more than likely go to hospital – we know a doctor can help us in most cases. Now the world is on full alert, the sick person will be tested and got into an isolation unit in double quick time.
At the same time, authorities will trace everyone they have had contact with and test them – they did in Nigeria and found no one had caught Ebola off the victim. In the West this frequently happens in HIV AIDS cases, which is why that illness has been so well contained in developed countries.
With global air travel this isn’t to say people won’t die in our countries. It is to say that we have a culture which believes in medicine, and infrastructure to contain it. Someone who has the early stage virus may not have any symptoms. At this stage they are not infectious. This means they may travel long distances, and in a world where you can fly right around the planet in 24 hours nowhere is totally safe.
Richard Shrubb
