Hi-Tech Hijack (34 page)

The first documented outburst of Ebola happened in 1976 in the small village of Yambuku in the heart of Congo.

The first patient who died of the disease had been mistakenly diagnosed with Malaria.

It took several more days and dozens of more casualties before it became clear the cause of the disease wasn’t malaria, but an unknown factor. The disease vanished from Yambuku and its surrounding area with the same mystery and speed with which it appeared.

In 1995, after almost twenty years of peace, the epidemic broke again in the city of Kikwit, about three hundred seventy miles east of Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire,(Kongo new name) and about twelve hundred miles south of the Ebola valley. Within several days three hundred fifty people died before the source of the epidemic was identified as Ebola. Here too the epidemic vanished just as it appeared, unexpectedly, leaving behind it several hundred deceased and one large mysterious question mark.

Panic took over all of Africa as it became clear that the virus from the far remote Ebola valley that had been believed to have disappeared traveled a long way south and no longer satisfied itself with what had been considered its original nesting ground. Due to the mystery surrounding the appearance and disappearance of the disease, the fear of its reoccurrence always exists.

The Ebola fever, which had been the plague of the African people alone, made headlines in the western world after being added to the list of diseases and epidemics that can someday be used as a biological weapon of mass destruction.

The threat caused governments and the World Health Organization to allocate resources to the research of Ebola, but so far had no results. As of today Ebola continues to pose a threat to the world. Between 2014 and 2015, the epidemic erupted in a few African states, predominately in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Guinea. Almost a thousand people died .A few international passengers arrived in the United States and Europe and were identified as carriers of the disease. A cure for Ebola has not yet been developed. To this day, the only means to stop the epidemic is to isolate those who are infected, but sadly, the unfortunate patients can rarely be saved.

The Ebola virus is a parasitic virus. A thousand times smaller than bacteria, it can only be detected with an electronic microscope with a resolution factor a thousand times more powerful than normal.

The Ebola virus makes use of its thorny exterior, attaches itself to the walls of a live cell, and sucks its core. The Ebola virus inserts its DNA chain into the cell, disguises itself as the actual cell, and stops the body from identifying it as an enemy and from building antibodies against it. By the time the body identifies the Ebola virus as the enemy, it is already too late: the Ebola virus grows, spreads, and causes the vascular system to collapse, usually with no chance of recovery. The victim dies of suffocation as all the internal systems of the body shut down.

Most viruses are parasitic and require live tissue to sustain them, so they leach on to animals and humans. The source of the Ebola virus in nature is unknown, so it is equally unknown how it was first transmitted to humans. Once the first person was infected, the virus can travel from one person to another via infected blood and bodily fluids. The assumption is that monkeys from the Ebola valley in east Congo were the carriers that first infected humans with the virus. The virus got its name—Ebola—after the river on the northeast border of Congo that flows west to where it meets the Congo River, which crosses Congo all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in the West.

There are four strands of Ebola: three are named after the areas where they were discovered—the Congo Ebola, the Ivory Coast Ebola, and the Sudan Ebola. The fourth strand is the unique Ebola Reston, which originated in Southeast Asia in the Philippines. This last strand is not lethal and people who have been in contact with infected monkeys from East Asia have come down with a fever, but developed antibodies to the virus and survived the disease. Until this day there is no known experiment that combines the Ebola Reston with one of the other deadly strands to develop a cure or vaccine that can eliminate the threat Ebola has over mankind.