On February 11, the WHO declared that, if all went well, in March the Ebola epidemic could be considered controlled. This hemorrhagic fever that plagues the Democratic Republic of the Congo – a country in eternal civil war and classified as “the rape capital of the world” – began in 2018 in a war zone, the Kiwu region, and to date has carried 2,253 people out of 3,874 confirmed cases of infection, which means a mortality rate of 60%.
The Congo has been splicing Ebola epidemics since it was discovered in 1976 at a Belgian religious mission in Yambuku, in the north of the country. The first scientist to arrive, the microbiologist Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, found a place where death was rampant: most of the nuns had died, those who could have fled, and the survivors had fevers and diarrhea. Without a mask or latex gloves, Muyembe – last year he was named by Nature magazine one of the 10 most influential scientific personalities of 2019 – took samples of the corpses without any protection.
The Congolese scientist had discovered a new and mysterious disease: something caused a hemorrhagic fever that caused muscle and headaches, vomiting and diarrhea. Then the kidneys and liver began to fail until profuse bleeding appeared in the final stages: some patients bleed from the eyes and others seemed to sweat blood. Death was almost inevitable: 88% of those who fell ill died. The following year the medical journal The Lancet published three articles that described the cause of this disease. Two of them suggested that it could be a new species of one already known, the Marburg virus, named after the city in which it was first discovered in 1967, and which also caused hemorrhagic fevers. The third article, written by researchers from the United States Center for Disease Control, defended that it was a new type of virus and named it after the river that crosses the area of the epidemic outbreak: Ebola.
As of December 2013, the four known Ebola species that affect humans were known to have killed 1,582 people. But that year a new and more virulent epidemic, with a mortality rate of 71%, killed more than 11,000 people and was the first time that the virus ended up jumping outside the African continent.
A very unknown virus
After 44 years of research, we still know very little about the virus: although it is suspected that the carrier may be the fruit bat, it is not known if there are other reservoirs, nor is it known which other animals can transport it without being infected, and the contagion It is caused by contact with infected body fluids, such as blood, vomit or feces, but also saliva, breast milk and semen (in fact, it is suspected that the virus may remain latent in semen for up to 9 months after infection) ; even some rare cases are known in which the virus can reactivate after remaining dormant for several months in places such as the eye or the central nervous system. For the survivors, their lives will not be as before: many of them suffer long-term side effects such as chronic joint pain, visual problems, neurological problems or hair loss.
Although there is no proven valid treatment, there are several experimental vaccines. In November 2019, the European Medicines Agency approved the use of a vaccine for Ebola, developed by the American pharmaceutical company Merck. Its distribution in Africa was secured in 2015 by the organization GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, which finances the distribution of vaccines in low-income countries, told manufacturers that they promised to buy their vaccines once they had been approved by “health authorities. strict “, as is the European one.
But the most striking thing about the 2013 Ebola epidemic, and in contrast to what is happening with the coronavirus, is that, despite the warnings of the World Health Organization, we Westerners wash our hands: we were safe and as long as he continued to kill Africans, little could matter to us; Liberia was a long way off. Why treat a disease from that continent-favela? As long as it continues to provide us with the resources we need to live our comfortable lives and remains our technological dump, where we send old appliances, cell phones and computers… No one responded to calls from the WHO, which seemed overwhelmed. It was in September 2014, when the UN declared this epidemic a threat to global health and security, that the West decided to respond; in part caused by the fact that some of its citizens returned home infected to help African professionals care for the sick. In fact, it was an epidemic where 5% of those infected were health personnel, in many cases due to a total lack of means. They were true heroes, but no one will remember them or monuments will be erected in their memory.
Today we are still unaware of the breach of borders caused by globalization, allowing viruses that were previously perfectly localized and contained in remote regions to reach any point on the planet in a matter of hours. An example? AIDS: only a group of highly traveling and sexually active people was enough to cause the pandemic that has plagued our planet since the 1980s and that so far has claimed 32 million lives.
