One day, in the remote village of
Meliandou located in southeastern Guinea, a two year old boy was
playing around a cola tree known to house a plethora of bats. Many
children in the neighborhood would make a game out of hunting and
killing these bats for fun. In December of 2013, the two year old boy
past away from a mysterious illness. This illness was later
identified as Ebola and the young boy was its first victim. He was
later referred to by health officials as 'patient zero'.
It has been well over a year since the
Ebola out break first made shock waves across the globe. In its path
of destruction, the virus has taken the lives of ten of thousands of individuals and
still continues its reign of terror today, though Ebola cases are
declining. This epidemic however, is far from over. Today, the virus
is localized to three main African countries, Guinea, Liberia
and Sierra Leone (although there have also been cases in places like
Spain, Mali, Nigeria, and the US).
The death of 'patient zero' has caught the attention of many researchers. Before the child's untimely death, he was known to have been playing with bats near a cola tree in his neighborhood. This tree located
in a village in Guinea has stumped researchers for months. The
looming question? Did the young boy contract the virus from the bats living in this tree? This is a
question that may never be answered seeing as how Guinean health
officials had the tree burned to the ground in efforts to stop all
bush meat consumption. All that was left behind from the ruins
were fragments of bat DNA which was enough to at least identify the
bat species. Mop condylurus was the species that lived in the
cola tree and researchers now hypothesize that this species of bats
could help explain how humans contracted the Ebola virus in the first
place. As researchers and scientists race to find clues as to how
this species of bat relates to the Ebola outbreak, many today
continue to fall victim to the disease. May the hunt for answers and
for a cure continue.
-Posted by Amanda Okpoebo (group C)
Very interesting. I never really learned too much about the Ebola virus, and I am fascinated to found out that it the epidemic may have been caused by a tree and the bats that lived inside of it. Thank you for educating us!
ReplyDeleteErika Nevins
Great post on such a relevant modern public health concern. It's interesting to see how researchers are still looking for answers concerning the virus' origins, hopefully this is something they will be able to determine in the near future to prevent its spread!
ReplyDelete-Hilary Mello
Good job, this post was well written and interesting because it relates to a topic that caused talks across the world on public health. I would be really interested to know if this was the cause of the Ebola breakout, and I would also be curious to find the reasons for Ebola in the past.
ReplyDelete-Madison Boone
It's nice to see a post about Ebola since it was so heavily covered by the media a year ago and has kind of disappeared from the public eye despite being an ongoing problem in some countries. I was surprised that I never heard about the disease's origin with "patient zero". Do you know how scientists were able to find these DNA fragments from the bat?
ReplyDelete-Meghan Harrington