Ebola is a rare virus that causes hemorrhagic fevers. While the exact origins of the virus are unknown, it spreads through direct contact with the blood or secretions of an infected person — and kills anywhere from 50-90 percent of its victims. One of its most gruesome symptoms is the bleeding from body orifices before dying. It's scary stuff.
Dr. Pierre Rollin, an epidemiologist at the Center for Disease Control (CDC), recently returned from Uganda to help quarantine the latest outbreak of the disease in Uganda. He told Business Insider that the outbreak could have been much worse: "[Compared to the outbreak in 2007], this one was detected much earlier, and we [have acquired] a lab in Entebbe that can receive specimen."
Without the presence of the new lab in Entebbe, a major town in Uganda, the virus could have spread much faster. "The fact that there is lab in Uganda that is able to receive every sample that is collected for suspicion of hemorrhagic fever is certainly very helpful in having outbreak that are much shorter in time," Dr. Rollin pointed out. Because you can identify if a patient is carrying the Ebola virus much more rapidly with an advanced lab, you can whittle your way down to the first patient much quicker.
While Dr. Rollin would not discuss figures, the WHO stated that 17 deaths have been reported since the beginning of the crisis — there were 181 Ebola fatalities during Uganda's last serious Ebola outbreak in 2008.
While the outbreak in Uganda may be coming to an end, health officials are not ready to declare the Ebola outbreak in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo finished. In the DRC, the outbreak began on August 17. The WHO stated that the Ebola virus has claimed the lives of 14 Congolese people in a statement earlier today.
Dr. Rollin noted that the lack of proper resources may make containment in the DRC very difficult. A modern lab is "something that doesn’t exist yet in DRC. And the DRC is much bigger country and has a lot of other problems, [including] transportation problems. So that really is something they have to tackle and figure out how to overcome. But I think Uganda is a good example of what should be done.”
Further, the DRC's overall size, lack of development, and ongoing violent internal conflict make building an efficient lab and treating a viral outbreak all the more difficult. The DRC has population that is double than its eastern neighbor's an area that is 2 million square kilometers larger. That means if a lab existed, it would have to cover many more people over a much larger space over underdeveloped infrastructure.
Although the two outbreaks have occurred within a month and 500 miles of each other, but the WHO has declared them unrelated. To date, the two "chains of transmission" have not linked by any common patients, and researchers have discovered that the outbreaks came from different strains of Ebola. The CDC keeps a chronological list of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever outbreaks, which you can see here.
"It's just a good season — if we can say that — for the virus," Dr. Rollin said.