Ebola Virus and  Emerging  Virus  

Second Part 

Ebola Virus

Also from a scientific point of view the piece of news appeared on ANSA SCIENCE AND TECNIQUE on 29^th August 2014 is nothing new. The transformation of a virus which originated from the animal world and effects a leap of species becoming transmissible from man to man, is one of the basic subjects of the first four chapters of the book”The intelligent virus”, published in 2002.

The Intelligent Virus

In its turn “The intelligent Virus” quotes the studies of distinguished scientists, among them some Nobel prizes, dating back to more than 60 years ago and well summarized in the wonderful”Emerging Viruses” published by Stephen S.Morse[1] in 1993.

Therefore let’s read, as to Ebola virus, what is written in the fourth chapter HPV and Emerging Viruses from “The Intelligent Virus” :  Back again to emerging viruses we must say something about Filoviruses. At the end of April in 1995 Italian mass media gave news about the death of two nuns from Bergamo killed at Kikwit, 500 kilometres far from Kinshasa, capital city of Zaire, by one of the new emerging viruses: Ebola. Many more deaths followed these first ones in an epidemic that caused a great sensation since just in those days the movie”Out Break” starring Dustin Hoffman, based on Richard Preston’s book”The hot zone”[2] was released in Italy.

Hot-Zone

The protagonist of the book and of the movie is just the virus: Ebola Virus.

The different types of Ebola virus together with its cousin Marburg were included in the family of filoviruses[3]. While studying this type of pathogens I realized that the story of their appearence and the epidemics they caused, is a sort of practical summary of all the theses I have supported so far . First of all there is again a double leap of species, almost contemporaneous:both Ebola -Zaire viruses and Ebola-Sudan ones appear in 1976 in two focuses of epidemic in Zaire and in Sudan 800 kilometres far from each other. Zaire variety is decidedly more virulent than Sudan one, so we soon notice a certain similitude with what happened with HIV-1 and HIV-2 and therefore it’s more difficult to consider a phenomenon, like the one of the leap of species which often repeats as a chance.

EBOLA-WHO

We have to remember that, in Burnet’s opinion, nearly all the viruses which adpted to invade man, came, at the beginning of civilization, from animal reservation[4]. This transfer still goes on and always Burnet, in the fifties, gives us various examples:encephalitis of St. Louis, equine encephalomyelitis, paralytic rabies in Trinidad, fever Q in Queensland in the western United States [5].

 Back again to Leonardo, we can certainly assert that the great scientist and in our opinion, philosopher, with the sentence we made use of in the incipit of “The Intelligent Virus”[6], anticipated, five hundred years ago, the discovery of the ecologic function of viral epidemics. The ecologic objective of emerging viruses, first of all HIV AIDS VIRUS, although previously sensed, will be stated systematically only in the studies published in Emerging Viruses in1993. Personally we think we have understood why Leonardo had decided to leave painting to devote himself to scientific research and how important his discoveries may be even if, till today, they haven’t been understood.

Leonardo-da-Vinci–

Leonardo’s great merit, as a genius who was ahead of his time, but also as the greatest expression of Renaissance man, was to have directed scientific research to the study of the meaning itself of life. The study of nature, man and all phenomenons concerning life was Leonardo’s philosophy or better religion according to which, after all, “God” is nature itself.

[1] Stephen S Morse Emerging Viruses Oxford University Press 1993

Stephen-S.-Morse-

[2] Preston R. Area di contagio RCS Libri e Grndi Opere Milano 1994.

[3] Kiley M P, Bowen E T, Eddy G A, Isaacson M, Johonson K M, Mc Cornich J B, Murphy F A, Pattin S R, PetersProsesky Q W, Regmery R L, Simpson D I, Slenczka W, Svreau P, VanderDerGroen G, Webb P A and Wulff H. Filoviridae:taxonomic home for Marburg and Ebola Virus Intervirology 18:24-23. 1982.

[4] Mac Farlane Burnet F. Virus as organism. Pag.32. Harvard University Press. 1950.

[5] Mac Farlane Burnet F. Op. Cit pag. 32-3.

[6]“Nature, being eager and taking pleasure in creating and making lives and forms over and over again, because it knows they are an increasing of its earthly matter, is willing and faster in creating than time in using up and  so it ordered many animals should become food to one another and this not satisfying such a desire, it often gives off a kind of poisonous and pestiferous vapours and a continuous plague over the great reproducing and flocking together of animals, and above all over men who increase so much because other animals don’t make them their food and once causes are taken away, effects will fail”.

Translated from Il Virus Intelligente by Enrica Narducci

See also

Ebola Virus and Emerging Virus First Part