Remember the Ebola epidemic? It’s still not over. Here’s the report from the ground.
by Julia Belluz
Vox.com
January 12, 2015
Even though Ebola has been snuffed out of the news cycle these days, the epidemic continues to burn in West Africa. The world is, in fact, still facing the biggest Ebola epidemic ever, mainly concentrated in West Africa. To date, there have been more than 20,000 cases and 8,000 deaths in nine countries; that’s four times the combined total of every previous Ebola outbreak in history.
This epidemic has also outlasted every prior outbreak, leaving observers to wonder if and when the human-to-human chain of transmission will end.
Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: Ebola will never, ever be eradicated. That’s not only because of the outrageous scale of the current epidemic, but because Ebola is a zoonotic disease meaning it lives in animals (most scientists think fruit bats) and only seldom makes the leap into the human population. This happens when unlucky brushes between species occur. Unless those animals are completely killed off (very unlikely), the virus can’t be wiped from the planet. We will always have to deal with Ebola.
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