What is one of the biggest fears that the present day world faces today? Now most people would say natural disaster, war, global warming, and AIDS, but has the virus Ebola ever crossed your mind? Through this paper, it will examine the many aspects of this disease that is capable of causing epidemics in days and could quite possibly bring the world to its knee's.
In August of 1967, the fear of some mysterious infection running rampant in an industrialized city that had never been seen before came true. The city was Marburg, in what was then West Germany. The disease that struck there went by no name at all, because no one had ever seen it before. After the disease had struck about 30 people, it slowly went away and disappeared but not after being named the Marburg virus. The next time this disease struck was in August 1976, in Zaire. As it came about some people started getting symptoms of typhoid fever, or the flu, but slowly more and more people became infected. For these people there was no help, as even modern medical doctors knew not what to do. They tried treating it with antibiotics for the symptoms they showed but to no avail things only got worse. Luckily the epidemic came to stop, but not after a couple hundred people were killed. After lab results came back, scientists realized that this was a new variation of the Marburg virus, and that how the epidemic had started in Zaire was that a man had been bit by a monkey in the jungle that carried the virus. When coming to the outpost hospital in Yambuku, Zaire he had passed it to others by contact and those people became infected and passed it to others causing a huge epidemic. The worst fear of all though was that if any of those infected people went into a city it would have been a needle-in-a-hay-stack trying to quarantine everyone that had come in contact with the infected person. What also was scary was the fact that in Sudan and Zaire where the epidemic broke out, the death rate for infected was 50% in Sudan and 90% in Zaire.
