DeeKnow’s Grotto

For some reason I have this morbid fascination with terrifying diseases that manage to defeat our scientific endeavours to eliminate them. As un-scientific and naive as it may sound I imagine that there's some sort of collective intelligence amongst their individual bodies that allows some of their number to cunningly avoid our capture and persist to pop up elsewhere to terrify us once again.

One such disease (filovirus actually) is Ebola, and its close cousin Marburg, which at this very moment is making its presence felt in typically dramatic fashion in Angola, Africa. Although they don't kill all who contract them, the especially dramatic thing about Ebola and Marburg are that they are haemorrhagic fevers which if left unsupported will ultimately result in the victim literally liquefying from the inside out gushing most of their bodily fluids and formerly solid organs out through every orifice of the body pooling on the floor below their convulsing and rapidly wasting body.

A couple of years ago I read the book 'Hot Zone' written by Richard Preston who writes about researchers tracking the two viruses through various parts of Africa. The vivid descriptions in the book of the onset of the disease in human hosts were truly horrifying, forget 12 Monkeys, this is the real thing, and it's at large today in Central Africa and in drug company and military research labs all over the world.

WHO, the Red Cross and Doctors-without-borders are all rushing staff and gear to Angola to contain what is the largest ever outbreak of Marburg, named after the Austrian city where a bunch of scientists developed the disease after contracting the virus during a research trip to the Central Africa.

The major problem with containment is that the folks in the Angolan village where the outbreak is centred are panicking, freaking about being locked up in hospitals to die, which is what can be expected by most who become infected, so they don't report the case, allowing it to transmit itself to other hosts

The general population are fleeing the area, and hospital staff are abandoning their posts through fear of becoming the next victim which is also exasperating the containment effort

I don't wish to get all Chicken-Little on you about this, but there are three things that really interest me regarding Marburg:

The most obvious is that the media don't seem to be giving it much coverage (the Waikato Times had a credit card sized article on it yesterday) yet this has outbreak has been going on for a month now, has killed 200 people, and its the sort of disease that could very well one day go on a global rampage if it ever makes it way through airport quarantine.

The most intriguing thing is the mystery surrounding the natural source of the virus itself. Like all viruses it requires a host to survive, but it has a very short incubation period which means it errupts and destroys its host within a dozen days or so, which requires it to move onto another host before then. The mystery is how it continues without making its usual attention seeking appearance. Where is its natural host and why isnt it apparent or obvious given the normally dramatic outward symptoms of it. The host is suspected to be primates or bats but hasnt been confidently identified.

The most worrying thing though is that since its original discovery in the 70's the virus has been researched extensively around the globe with the specific intention of weaponising it, and despite international pacts prohibiting the pursuit, it has certainly been incubated by a number of super-powers over the last couple of decades for the very purpose of loading into war-heads in an active state for subsequent liberal dispersion over enemy population centres.

Feels great to be alive don't it?

10:58:53 AM