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Ebola Patient Zero Identified, Probably Infected By Bats
BarbaraHudson writes The CBC is reporting that scientists have possibly found the source of Patient Zero's Ebola infection. From the story: "Patient Zero, two-year-old Guinean Emile Ouamouno, may have been infected while hunting or playing with bats inside a hollow tree near his home in a small village named Meliandou. The study determined Ouamouno's interaction with bats is the likely cause of transmission by ruling out other possibilities, namely that the virus was spread by the consumption of bushmeat. Only children and women presented symptoms or died in the beginning of the current epidemic. Research published in the EMBO Molecular Medicine journal finds that the single transmission, from bat to boy, was then spread human to human."
It's not finger pointing. Knowing who your patient zero was is absolutely vital if you want to be able to reduce the likelihood of future outbreaks.
Ebola doesn't have a natural reservoir in the human population; it's too fast-acting and (with the exception of the Reston strain) deadly for that. It tends to have a similar effect on other primates as well. So identifying where the disease does live between outbreaks in the human population (likely in a species which experiences no or limited symptoms from infection) is critical, both for research purposes (the ability to keep an eye on the virus before its latest strain jumps into humans) or for educating people as to which particular pools of the animal population to stay away from.
If you go back through medical history - right back to bubonic plague having a natural reservoir in rats' fleas - identifying how a virus has been making the jump into humans has been the first stage in controlling it.
I imagine once word of this gets out to people in certain African nations infected by Ebola, it'll get distilled into "bats are threatening our survival" and lead to wholesale slaughter of bats. Something similar happened with cats mistakenly being associated with the Black Death. This will then lead to a surge in mosquito populations, which will then lead to a surge in malaria cases, which will likely kill more people than the Ebola outbreaks themselves.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Are you suggesting that other races rather die of hunger than eat animals?
Must be a weird vegan community you were raised in.
It means "patient zero for this outbreak". Unlike some diseases, Ebola doesn't have a constant presence in the human species. Most of the time, there are no humans on the planet infected with Ebola (compare and contrast with the common cold, which exists in an endemic steady state among humans).
Ebola outbreaks begin when a human is exposed to the disease from a non-human source (bats have been suspected for decades, but it was tricky to pin down). So "patient zero" for an Ebola outbreak is the human who is the first to be infected (and who then goes on to infect others).
One of the big questions about Ebola outbreaks is why there aren't more of them. If bats are the carriers, then given how widespread bats are across Africa, why do outbreaks so isolated? Tracking down the patient zero for each outbreak is crucial if we're going to understand that (and understanding it could be the key to preventing future outbreaks).
Umm, and how exactly do you imagine evolution works? It's just random mutation and not-quite-so-random death. If you have an advantage that delays your death, but don't breed during the respite, then you are irrelevant to that aspect of evolution. But that's very rare - sex is typically a lifelong interest, and males remain fertile indefinitely while humans and orcas are the only known mammals where the females eventually become infertile. Pretty much everything else breeds until death. If you have a trait that reduces your interest in sex, then it will almost certainly be bred out of the population - unless it's genetically linked to something that provides a corresponding advantage to yourself or your close relatives. The selective pressure will obviously be less on age-related changes, which won't start manifesting until most of your breeding opportunities are behind you.
Basically, we don't need to know why someone survived a plague - it's enough that they did: there will be at least a slightly higher concentration of "useful" genes for surviving the disease among the survivors than there was originally, and thus almost certainly a greater concentration of those genes in the next generation. After the same basic species of disease sweeps through a population a few thousand times pretty much everyone still surviving will have many disease-resistant genes.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.