The thought about genetics of Westerners as compared to those in Africa is extremely interesting and worthy of research.
The problem, though, is that it is difficult to find people to study. No one in their right mind would willingly become infected and those that do become infected are dangerous to be around. Plus a lot of them die.
I am skeptical that Africans were not, like Europeans, subject to a plague epidemic or two in their distant past. Just because there is nothing documented (for obvious reasons) does not mean that a similar history did not occur.
But it is an interesting avenue of pursuit in unraveling the mystery of the disease.
A couple of articles of interest from, of all places,
The New Yorker. I read the first one,
The Obola Wars, perhaps a week or so ago and it is authored by Richard Preston (of
The Hot Zone fame). In it he first describes how incredibly infectious Obola is and then how researchers are mapping its genetic mutations. Very interesting, though, is the second part of the article which describes in extreme detail how the Samaritan's Purse doctor and nurse were saved...the timeline from infection to being Obola-free. Probably the most comprehensive explanation of the events that can be found anywhere...
At the ELWA hospital, Lance Plyler, with the drug now in his hands, agonized about whether he should give it to Writebol or to Brantly. He found some words in the Book of Esther: “Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Writebol was extremely ill by now, but he found Brantly in surprisingly good condition, working on his laptop in bed. Brantly was more concerned about Writebol. “Give the drug to Nancy—I’ll be getting out of here in a couple of days,” he told Plyler. An evacuation jet had been ordered, and he was evidently thinking of that. Still, Plyler put off the decision. Another night passed.
On the morning of July 31st, Plyler went to see Nancy Writebol, and decided to give her the drug. She seemed close to the end stage of Ebola-virus disease; she had developed a sea of red spots and papules across her torso—signs of hemorrhages under the skin—and she was beginning to bleed internally. She could crash at any time: lose blood pressure, go into shock, and die. One of the bottles was taken out of the freezer, and Plyler had Writebol hold it in her armpit to defrost it.
Around seven o’clock that evening, Plyler went to Brantly’s house to see how he was doing. When he looked in the window, he was stunned. Brantly had abruptly gone into the end-stage decline. His eyes were sunken, his face was a gray mask, and he was breathing in irregular gasps. “A clinician knows the look,” Plyler told me later. “He was dying.” Brantly, a clinician himself, realized that he was on the verge of a breathing arrest. With no ventilators at the hospital, he wouldn’t make it through the night.
Plyler made a decision. “Kent, I’m going to give you the antibodies.” He would split the three doses, giving one bottle to Brantly, the second bottle to Writebol, and the third bottle to whichever of them was not evacuated.
A nurse got the bottle from under Writebol’s arm. Writebol said that she was glad for Brantly to have it. While Plyler watched, a doctor named Linda Mabula suited up and went into Brantly’s house, where she prepared an I.V. drip. The plan was to drip the first dose into him very slowly, so that the antibodies wouldn’t send him into shock. Plyler stayed by the window and prayed with Brantly. After less than an hour, Brantly began to shake violently, a condition called rigors. It occurs in people who are near death from an overwhelming bacterial infection. Plyler had a different feeling about these rigors. “That’s just the antibodies kicking the virus’s butt,” he told Brantly through the window.
Three hours later, Lisa Hensley got a text from Lance Plyler: “Kent is about halfway into the first dose. Honestly he looks distinctly better already. Is that possible?” Hensley texted back to say that monkeys on the brink of death had shown improvement within hours. Two days later, having received one dose of ZMapp out of the required three doses, and a blood transfusion from a fourteen-year-old boy who had recovered from Ebola, Kent Brantly walked onto the evacuation plane. At Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta, he received two more doses of ZMapp, which had been sent from the tobacco facility in Kentucky, and was discharged from the hospital after two weeks, free of the virus.
The second article chronicles
"What We Don't Know About Obola."What don’t we know about Ebola? In some ways, we’re only aware of how much we don’t understand because of the little that we do. No one has identified Ebola’s “natural reservoir”—the animal species that carry the dormant pathogen during lulls between human outbreaks. Finding the hidden pool of the virus would go a long way toward eradicating it. At first, researchers thought that the hosts were chimpanzees, gorillas, and other primates. Now it is clear that these animals get sick and die too quickly to hold on to the virus for long. Although Ebola may be carried without symptoms in fruit bats for extended periods, as the media has widely reported, additional candidates keep emerging—a certain strain of the virus was found to be harbored by pigs in the Philippines in 2008, for example. To discover the source of Ebola, we should send trained field workers into the bush to test, isolate, and then kill infected animals to remove them as a food source and limit their capacity to transmit the virus.
There is precedent for this kind of strategy. In the bird flu outbreaks of 2005 through 2007, certain flocks of chickens in Asia carried deadly strains of influenza. Chinese public-health officials were able to target and slaughter them, snuffing out an epidemic that otherwise could have spread with great speed and ferocity, and significantly reducing the chance of flare-ups afterward.
Although we know that bodily fluids are contagious, we still don’t have a definitive picture of how the virus enters the body’s cells. But learning the biology of Ebola infections is necessary for designing and deploying effective drugs and vaccines. Unlike H.I.V., which can only infect a limited set of cell types in the body, Ebola is promiscuous and attacks white blood cells, the cells that line our vessels, and cells that make up our liver, adrenal glands, and airways. Research studies have suggested at least three potential paths that the virus can take to invade our tissues. In one sequence, Ebola attaches to a protein on the surface of a cell that is meant to transport cholesterol. After Ebola has hijacked the surface protein, it sneaks into the cell and rapidly proliferates. (That transport protein is ubiquitous in the body, because all our organs require cholesterol in order to function normally.) Other experiments have indicated that Ebola can commandeer a protein called TIM-1, which is widely distributed in conjunctiva, the insides of our eyelids, and in our cornea. Despite taking precautions with gloves and facemasks, health-care workers who have become infected may have inadvertently brushed a finger near their eye, giving the virus access to TIM-1.
And then there's this from The Federalist,
"Medical Science Doesn't Support Official Rhetoric On Obola."The unavoidable inference from official statements is that victims without symptoms (yet!) cannot transmit the disease, and the “symptoms” are as straightforward as a “fever” (which remains ill-defined). Ebola can only be transmitted via “direct contact” with “body fluids” and then must enter new victims’ bodily openings. Ebola can’t be transmitted from dry surfaces of, say, doorknobs and bowling balls or invade dry skin surfaces that are not abraded, according to CDC’s initial assurances (accepted on faith, apparently, by the president, the New York Times reporter, the Dallas nurses, and even the New York City doctor who cared for Liberian Ebola patients and who apparently walked the city’s streets on his return, even while not feeling well.
These official assurances should not have passed the smell test. They contrast with the videos of Emory University’s Ebola specialists (and other caregivers and decontamination crews) who, when yards away from Ebola patients, were suited up—head to toe, with multiple layers of clothing, goggles, and respirators—with their gear appearing to be as protective as that worn by Japanese workers who in 2011 began seeking to contain the radiation leaks at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear workers. The Emory Ebola caregivers got hosed down with chemicals on exiting the isolation rooms. They also suited up and disrobed following strict protocols, with supervisors watching.
