Ebola  Virus  and  Emerging  Virus 

First Part

Ebola-Virus-

“ No effect is in nature without a reason, understand the reason and you need no experience”.   (Leonardo Da Vinci [1])

From ANSA SCIENCE AND TECNIQUE of Friday 29^th August 2014 we deduce and report verbatim:

 A funeral set off Ebola. The origin of the epidemic recreated thanks to the genetic map of the virus.

 It was the funeral of a victim of the hemorrhagic fever (Ebola) to spread two different types of the virus from Guinea to Sierra Leone. It was recreated by the genetic map of the virus, published on the review Science ,but already widespread in the data bank of the National centre for the Biotechnological information(Ncbi) of the United States, so as to make it immediately at the disposal of the whole scientific community. In fact they are precious data to discover the weak points of the virus responsible for the widest epidemic of the hemorrhagic fever(Ebola) which has occurred in Africa from 1976 till today.

Ebola is a mortal virus in 78% cases and knowing the genetic features is important for future medicines, vaccines and tests for a precocious diagnosis.

Ebola-virus-

With the coordination of Harvard American university and Massachusetts Institute of Technology(Mit), the research was conducted with the collabortion of the Department of Health in Sierra Leone.Also many African researchers, five of them died of Ebola before the publication of the study,partecipated.

ebola-death-

” The implications of this research on future therapies won’t be immediate,but the genetic information are basic for the comprehension of the disease”, researchers point out on Science. The genetic material they studied consists in 99 sequences of the virus taken from 78 patients hospitalized in Sierra Leone. Besides researchers compared the genetic data of the circulating virus with the ones of 20 types responsible for some epidemics of Ebola occurred in the last ten years.They discovered that, while in the past contacts with animals that are the natural”tank” of the virus (like fruit bats) caused the epidemic, this time, above all, contacts from man to man.So, for example, the passing of the two types of the virus from Guinea to Sierra Leone is explained.

Ebola pathogenesis

As to their ” predecessors” , Ebola new types are spreading more quickly:at present, researchers write, it is recorded “an exponential progress with a period of 34.8 days’ redoubling period. Finally it came out also that, unlike what happened in the past, the circulating virus changes very easily, so that at least 300 versions which appeared in the first 24 days of the diffusion of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, were identified.

Ebola-Outbreak

With the utmost respect for the researchers of Harvard American university and Massachusetts Institute of Technology(Mit), the piece of news, reported by Ansa, doesn’t seem a special one both from a mass media point of view and a scientific one. Since the time of the black plague people had known those who had seen to the funeral and inhumation of infected persons were at high risk of contracting the illness. The persons who carried corpses and buried them came from the lowest social standing so that their name, monatti, had been for long time a synonym of a desplicable person also because, usually, “monatti”, besides being people who had recovered from the illness and so immune from it, were fellows sentenced to death or prisoners.

Monatti-

After some time even “monatti” refused to cope with the corpses of plague victims, threfore the latter were left unburied along the streets or in the fields.  The rhetorical or better mass media artifice to refer to a funeral as the cause of the transmission of Ebola virus from man to man isn’t absolutely something new because there were some other cases of a similar human transmission of an emerging virus during a funeral. In the Fourth chapter( Hpv and Emerging viruses) of the book “The Intelligent Virus” in 2002 we told about the case of a virus similar to Hantaan transmitted from man to man during a funeral in an Indian reservation of the Navayo tribe.

Hantav

If now we consider,as we already did previously, the great number of different viruses there are in the animal reservation and the high rate of mutation of already known viruses, we can imagine how many pathogenous viruses are ready to take part in the race to conquer the longed, wide market of human population. I’m speaking, for example, of Hantaan viruses called like that after the name of the Korean region where they were identified for the first time.

People had thought for years they might be present also in America so that Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist and Nobel prize, had been able to prove the presence of viruses similat to Hantaan in many rodents captured in his estate in Maryland [2].

According to tradition the viruses of Hantaan genus are given the name of the region where they are identified, the American virologist called his virus Prospect hill. Yet the microorganism didn’t appreciate such a quiet beginning and wishing to show itself, in a right way,to American mass media, it chose a film script.The scene takes place in an Indian resevation of the Navayo tribe. The occasion is the funeral of a nineteen-year-old girl who died of what seems a trivial flu.

The desperate fiancé, few days after the funeral, dies of the same mysterious illness. Some more deaths, thirteen in all, follow the first two ones. The suspicion that the epidemic was caused by the Prospect Hill virus, modified in view of a bacteriologic war by the Army Medical Research Institute,comes to enliven the whole. In few days the case is known all over America thanks also to the ingredients that make it a story good for the best movies.

The mystery is solved thanks to the intuition of Robert Parmenter, a zoologist of New Mexico University.Also this time we find all the usual factors we saw to be the origin of many epidemics.First of all there is an animal population(mice) in a phase of a maximum numerical increase.The increase of rodent population was caused by heavy rains and plenty of snow which, in normally dry zones, caused a great production of pine-kernels and insects, food for deer mice.Then there is a virus at RNA endemic to mice population but thanks to the increase of the latter it can effect a leap of species from mouse to man.In the new host virulence is such as to cause mortal effects in short time.

Hantavirus

In fact at the beginning symptoms are those of a banal flu which soon turns into a serious respiratory syndrome with pulmonary edema and death.

The virus in question is named after the zone where the small rodents live: Canyon Muerto. The apparent contradiction of the outbreak of an epidemic in an area that isn’t densely populated can be easily explained with the extraordinary development of mice population[3]. If such an epidemic had started in a zone at high human density, consequences should have been much more dramatic.In a narrow community the diffusion of the virus is limited to the few occasions of assembling( in this case a funeral ) and stops within the limits of the community itself. This seemed, at least, the most logical explanation.

Then we wondered why the virus of Canyon Muerto, in the meantime renamed Sine Nombre or No name for the protest of the inhabitants of that region, doesn’t cause the illness in all the people it infects.

Also the number of infected persons among the workers charged with the decontamination of the spots infested by deer mice is low.

Finally it would seem that only 25% of the cases of pulmonary syndrome, recorded in the Navayo reservation,may be really associated with Hantaan virus; paraphrasing the story of Ulysses imprisoned by the Cyclop, we could say nobody(no name) caused the epidemic[4].

[1] Leonardo Da Vinci. Codice Atlantico, foglio 147 (1487). Biblioteca Ambrosiana Milano. Republished in Leonardo Da Vinci Scritti Letterari, pag.65. BUR Milano 1991.

[2] Gajdusek D C. Virus hemorrhagic fevers. Special reference with renal syndrome epidemic hemorrhagic fever. J Pediatric 60:841-57 1962.

[3] Lee H W, Lee P W and Baek L A. Intraspecific transmission of hantan virus, etiologic agent of Korean hemorrhagic fever, in the rodent apodemusagrarius. A M J TropMedHyg 30:1106-12.12.1981.

[4] In the Odyssey by Homero Ulysses, the protagonist, is captured by the Cyclop, a monstrous giant with only one eye, and taken prisoner in a cave together with his mates. Forsighted Ulysses, while questioned by the Cyclop, answers his name is Nobody. Later the homeric hero, while the drunk giant is sleeping, can deprive him of his only eye and run away together with his mates, clutched at the fleece of some sheep. When the Cyclop calls other giants for help, he can do but shout:“Nobody blinded me!”

Translated from Il Virus Intelligente by Enrica Narsducci

To be continued in

Ebola Virus and Emerging Viruses Second Part