Two American health care workers, a physician and another volunteer, have been infected with the Ebola virus while working with Ebola patients in Liberia. The physician is in serious but stable condition and the woman is in very serious but stable condition. Ebola has a mortality rate of up to 90%, but the chances of surviving are lower if the disease is caught early. They are not the first Americans to come down with Ebola. The first American to come down with the disease is already dead.
The recent Ebola epidemic has hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It has killed 672 people so far, making it the deadliest Ebola outbreak so far. One of Liberia’s top physicians recently died of the disease. Ebola is harbored by some sort of an animal, possibly a bat or rodent. To date, no animal carrier or reservoir for Ebola has yet been found.
Destruction of jungle and especially the killing of large fauna, much of which has already been exterminated in West Africa for something disgusting called “bush meat,” has the effect of radically increasing rodent populations in disturbed habitat in which megafauna have been removed. Man’s encroachment into the jungles of Africa and especially the disturbance of intact jungle habitat and ecosystems is thought to play the most important role in the emergence of these new diseases.
For instance, HIV jumped from the chimpanzee SIV virus to humans, in turn transforming itself to HIV, via the stupid practice of slaughtering monkeys and apes for bush meat. In butchering up bush meat from these animals, bush meat hunters invariable get monkey or ape blood all over their hands and arms at the very least. It was in this matte that HIV moved into the human population.
