International: Plague worse than Aids turns bodies to water
Roger Highfield, Science Editor, reports on the task force investigating a virus
from Africa that could threaten the world
TEAMS of experts equipped with protective "space suits" were preparing yesterday to
investigate and contain the suspected outbreak of the Ebola virus, which has claimed 170
lives in Kikwit, a city of 185,000, in Zaire.
Kikwit has been placed under quarantine, but the contagious and untreatable virus which liquefies human organs has spread to nearby Musango.
Experts admit that it is becoming increasingly likely that the virus could follow in the path of
Aids and find its way rapidly from Africa to the rest of the world.
Changes in human behaviour and the environment inevitably disturb the ecological balances
between man and microbes.
Unusual viruses infect the human population, multiply and spread. All the time they might
undergo genetic mutations which could increase their virulence.
Documented examples abound. American soldiers contracted a deadly virus known as
Hantaan when they fought in Korea. Smallpox was transferred from the old world to the
new by European settlers, helping the conquest of South America by Spain. Yellow fever
travelled with the slave trade. Mosquitoes carrying the virus laid eggs in water barrels
carried by slave ships.
The latest epidemic, though not yet confirmed, is of sufficient concern to move several
international teams to take immediate action to contain the outbreak.
Medecins sans Frontieres yesterday organised a team of volunteers and protective
equipment to isolate infected individuals. A spokesman said it was hoped the outbreak
was not Ebola. "That would be a catastrophe. It is quite a large town and there is a lot
of trade with the capital, Kinshasa."
A sample from an infected patient has been sent by the Antwerp Institute of Tropical
Medicine to the US Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, which itself is sending a
team of investigators equipped with protective suits and respirators. The Baptist Missionary
Society has been granted a licence by the Zairean government to set up a satellite link with a
hospital in Vanga, a town near the outbreak, to improve links with international medical experts. And the World Health Organisation has sent protective clothing and gloves to medical personnel at Kikwit, following an alert issued by its regional office for Africa in Kinshasa. Dr Muyembe Tamfun, a consultant to the WHO, blamed the Ebola virus.
Officials at Zaire's Health Ministry say the outbreak began on April 10, when a surgical
patient at Kikwit's hospital contaminated medical staff.
The most virulent form of Ebola kills about 90 per cent of those it infects and there is no
treatment or vaccine. The virus is so feared by scientists that it is officially classified as a
Level 4 pathogen and can be studied only in a super-sealed facility. Even HIV, the Aids
virus, merits only a Level 3 classification. "With the little we know, we're going to have
to assume that this could be Biosafety Level 4, the highest level of possible infection,"
said Dr Rima Khabbaz, an infectious disease specialist in Atlanta.
In 1976, 274 of 300 people infected in an Ebola outbreak in one village in Zaire died.
Ebola is spread through body fluids and secretions, or direct contact with an infected
patient. The first symptoms are usually a headache and temperature. As the virus multiplies
inside the body, it attacks all the organs, which jam with congealed blood and then disintegrate while surrounding tissue bleeds uncontrollably. Delirium and death usually follow within days.
Ebola is a filovirus, a worm-shaped virus whose natural habitat seems to be somewhere
in the rainforests of central Africa, near the presumed origins of HIV.
They are thought to be very ancient, but their potential to kill large numbers of people is
new, as more and more humans encroach on the rainforest.
Experts in Atlanta were analysing victims' blood samples that arrived from Zaire on
Monday - a process that could take until today, said a spokesman. The Pasteur Institute in
Paris and National Institute of Virology in Johannesburg have also been asked to provide
assistance in dealing deal with the outbreak.
British virus experts at the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research, in Porton Down,
Wilts, are already involved in an international investigation of another outbreak in the Ivory
Coast, West Africa, which centres on a Swiss scientist who is thought to have been infected
by a chimpanzee.
According to Dr Graham Lloyd, head of the diagnosis group at the centre, who has made a
special study of Ebola, three types of the virus have been identified.
Ebola Zaire, first seen in the 1970s, is regarded as the most deadly, killing around 90 per
cent of those infected. Ebola Sudan was isolated around the same time. In 1989 another,
less-deadly strain called Ebola Reston appeared in a quarantine facility near Washington DC.
A film about the outbreak of a deadly tropical virus, starring Dustin Hoffman, has just been
released and is based on the true story of the outbreak of Ebola Reston virus in the laboratories of a federal primate quarantine unit in Washington.
