The source of ebola discovered. If you read The Hot Zone you kind of knew this was coming, but it’s still cool to know.
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Fruit Bat Is Off
Looks like scientists have found the infection reservoir for Ebola: Fruit bats. Never did like fruit bats. (via Balloon Juice)…
DougJ
How come we never hear the *good news* about the Ebola virus?
Perry Como
:ahem:
Beer blogging?
Tim F.
Keep your pants on. I had a post about hangovers lined up but I decided it was lame and scratched it. Real beer blogging to commence shortly.
Krista
Tim – for any blogging that takes place after 9pm EST, I think you can safely assume that very few of us have our pants on.
demimondian
After all, at least 1 person in five who contracts it survives, if sufficiently aggressive treatment is provided. And the ones who live usually haven’t taken much damage from the dehyration and blood loss that the disease causes.
DougJ
It seems like we never hear about all the species of bats that *don’t carry* deadly viruses.
demimondian
We need to fight the atheists, satanists, and other undead enders who are participating on the War on Vampires!
rachel
I thought it might have been the bats, being that the one of the earliest recorded victims had visited a cave full of them shortly before he came down with it. Ugh! Haemorrhagic fevers are “teh ick!”
That was the good news about the Ebola virus. Once you find the vector, you can prevent it from spreading.
Huh? Vampire bats carry rabies. The ones that carry Ebola virus are fruit bats.
demimondian
rachel…actually, DougJ and I are local trolls. Don’t take us seriously. Each of our comments is based on a frequently used trope around here, and are meant purely ironically. (Watch out for references to the President eating a baby, too. Nobody really thinks that President Bush is a cannibal.)
That said, I think that I can’t imagine a worse vector — a flying mammal that plays a key role in both the local ecosystem and sn importsnt role in the local human food chain isn’t one of those vectors you can “prevent from disseminating the virus”.
rachel
I know, I just felt like playing straight.
I think that once the locals know those yummy bats carry the virus that turns people into walking, vomiting running sores, those bats are going to stop looking so tasty. *shrugs* Other than that, perhaps some way to repell the bats from populated areas might be devised… Maybe some kind of sonic devise.
One thing’s for sure: killing them all is a bad idea. Kill all the bats, and the plants that depend on them for polination start to die out.
StupidityRachel
Rachel, don’t count on it, there are still Americans eating hamburgers made of cow brain even though they know about mad cow disease…
StupidityRules
Rachel, don’t count on it, there are still Americans eating hamburgers made of cow brain even though they know about mad cow disease…
BIRDZILLA
Ebola bats so much for the news that only meat spreads ebola i guess its everywhere
demimondian
All right, StupidityRules/StupidityRachel — whose sock puppet are you?
Bob In Pacifica
There was a book I read ten or so years ago, EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS AND EBOLA: NATURE, ACCIDENT OR INTENTIONAL? It was by a guy named Leonard Horowitz. It was an interesting book, pointing out all the research on diseases like the one that cannibals in the New Guinean highlands suffered, a prion-based disease, which affected a very, very narrow segment of humanity, would suddenly emerge as a major problem. The cannibals’ disease, related to Jakob-Cruezfeld, then explodes as Mad Cow Disease. Ebola and similar diseases started appearing in random epidemics after research in a German laboratory.
The initial epidemiology of AIDS makes no sense unless one connects it to various government and international vaccination programs. The initial explosion of AIDS in Africa occurred a few years after a huge innoculation program in Central Africa. The first appearances of AIDS in the US occurred in the gay communities in New York, San Francisco and LA six months or so after a government hepatitis B vaccination program.
That’s why when I read that when the Department of Defense scientists have unlocked the DNA for the 1918 worldwide flu epidemic I suspect that another one is one the way.
I suspect an intentionality, much like selling smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians or catapulting plague-infected corpses into towns under siege. Biological warfare.
Vlad
Mmm, hemorragific!
Tulkinghorn
Bob.
I hat to break it to you, but you need to start with correlation, work your way up to causality, and then go for the intentionality argument.
As far as causality is concerned, the consumption of ‘bush meat’ became fashionable about thirty years ago. Occam’s razor leans heavily for that one. So stepping forward with an argument about germ warfare based on a previously unkown type of pathogen (retrovirus) sounds beyond ludicrous.
StupidityRules
I’m sorry for the StupidityRachel nick… My mind wandered and I didn’t see my error before I had posted… One more reason why registering would be a good idea… :)
Faux News
I like the idea of “The War on Vampires”. Perhaps I should invest in Garlic companies.
Krista
Faux News – but for the government to like it, it can’t be a war on specific people, just a war on a concept. So it would have to be “The War on Vampirism” instead.