Six Months of Ebola—Where the Virus has been and Where It’s Going

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Six months ago, in a remote village of Guinea, a 2-year-old boy mysteriously fell ill of a hemorrhagic fever. Now, since the December 2013 outbreak, the disease has spread to the largest, most lethal Ebola epidemic in history. And it has yet to show any signs of cessation.

As of Friday, Sept. 26 the World Health Organization has officially reported 6,242 cases of Ebola worldwide with 2,909 of those resulting in fatalities. With the viral infection now spreading to five countries in West Africa, and a global effort long underway in trying to contain the disease, many have wondered where the disease has come from, and where it is likely to go.

"Today, one of the biggest barriers to control is violence from an impoverished, terrified and shattered population that does not understand what hit it and fights back the only way it can" the World Health Organization wrote in a recent retrospective essay recapping the crisis in Guinea. "Last week, health workers in several parts of the country were viciously attacked by angry mobs, forcing some medical teams to flee for their lives."

"One team hid in the bush for more than a day. Others saw their vehicles canalized and their medicines and equipment collected and publicly burned, as though such acts might work as a 'cleansing ritual'."

In other regions such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, even a far greater understanding of the disease has not shown any help in abating the spread of Ebola. Global health workers from nations all around the world have tried to educate the public on the risks and the means of spreading the disease, and yet poor sanitary practices have led to thousands of cases. In fact, early in Sierra Leone's outbreak, the virus was able to gain a great foothold within the population as more than 365 individuals contracted Ebola and later died after touching the contagious corpse of a local medicine woman at her traditional funeral. And only weeks later, bodies began to line the streets as though afraid of the infection placed family members and corpses in the gutters of major towns.

In countries like Liberia, the World Health Organization says that "the true number of deaths will likely never be known; bodies in the notoriously poor, filthy and overcrowded West point slum, in Monrovia, have simply been thrown into the two nearby rivers", further complicating the spread of the contaminants.

Known as "Hemorrhagic Fever" for the final stages of the viral infection, Ebola has proven to be an extremely complex and lethal pathogen, as bodies now line the streets of nations in Africa's western provinces. Though to have originated from the consumption of African bushmeat, i.e. infected monkeys, Ebola carries similar origins to the global killer HIV and is even symptomatically worse. Transmittable by blood or mucosal secretions, Ebola has spread in the unsanitary conditions of West Africa as family members dispose of infected bodies on the streets of major cities, causing researchers to fear that given time the virus may mutate into a pathogen transmitted through the air.

While great efforts are being made in research labs worldwide, in attempts of finding an inoculation or cure that can effectively combat the viral pathogen, the World Health Organization firmly does not believe that a viable cure will be distributed to affected populations in the foreseeable future, causing great concern for where and how the virus may continue to spread.

"The research and development incentive is virtually nonexistent" the World Health Organization recently wrote. "A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay."