During the 2014 outbreak, the University of Córdoba released this video on Ebola explaining several key questions about this virus that alarmed half the world.
What is Ebola?
Ebola is a river that runs through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a filament-shaped virus is also called a filovirus, which causes a disease that was first detected in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks, one of them occurred in Yambuku, a village located near the Ebola River.
Ebola is also the name for the disease caused by the Ebola virus and previously known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever.
How is the Ebola virus transmitted?
The virus lives in wild animals such as apes, bats, and antelopes, and from them it can pass to humans.
Between humans it is transmitted by direct contact with blood, saliva, urine, semen or mucus.
For a sneeze from an infected person to infect you, the patient would have to sneeze directly into your face in the acute phase of the disease.
Symptoms of the disease
You can only have Ebola if you have been in direct contact with the fluids of an infected person who has the symptoms, which are: high fever, headache, sore throat, severe weakness, vomiting, diarrhea, skin rashes, failure of kidney, liver failure and, in some cases, internal and external bleeding.
The incubation period lasts between 2 and 21 days , and disease infection can only be confirmed by laboratory analysis.
Ebola treatment
There is no proven effective treatment yet, but various forms of hemotherapy, immunotherapy, and drug therapy are being evaluated. Two potential Ebola vaccine candidates are currently being evaluated.
Prevention continues to be a key piece to achieve the containment of Ebola. It is necessary to reduce the risk of transmission from wild animals to humans, person-to-person transmission, with particular emphasis on sexual transmission, and to adopt rapid measures to contain outbreaks.
Ebola prevalence sites
Africa is the continent most affected by the disease. As of the 2014 outbreak, 2,387 people had been infected in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Sudan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and 1,590 people died.
In 2014, a new outbreak appeared in West Africa, and in just six months, 8,917 people were infected in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Senegal and Nigeria, and half of them died. In Spain, the first case of contagion outside Africa was diagnosed on October 6, 2014.
The outbreak lasted until 2016, and is considered the most extensive and complex since the Ebola virus was discovered in 1976.
