Ebola Virus Quotes

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.

To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.

When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.

It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.

Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty.

Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194)

Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human. The virus exploits the best parts of human nature as a means of travel from one person to the next. In this sense the virus is a true monster.

It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.

EBOLA VIRUS put humanity at a great risk. We must act now and together to prevent further crisis.

Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses—how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth.

Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.

COVID-19 … another bioengineered virus we’ve added to our past accomplishments: H5N1, SIV, HIV, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, SARS, Zika—the list is so long. We have so many biolabs situated around the world.” The other man replied, “The original virus’ strain was specifically engineered to target the Asian respiratory system. Releasing the coronavirus in Wuhan, a test city for 5G and a central transit hub, was key to our strategy. Then we tailored different strains that would target other ethnic groups in different countries. Unfortunately, the virus isn’t as effective as it was supposed to be. The Good Club had planned on it culling a much larger percentage of the world’s population. Since there weren’t widespread deaths, we’ve had to resort to inflating the numbers, enforcing practices to help kill more people at hospitals, and a massive disinformation campaign to promote fear. Soon we’ll be releasing another strain and will utilize the CDC and the WHO to make our vaccine cocktail mandatory in as many countries as possible, as well as forcing through mandates, like masks to lower people’s oxygen intake, causing illness and depression, and implementing vaccine passports as the first move toward an all-in-one digital ID is also key.

He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus.

Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered." A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. "A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out," he said. A scream cut the air. It sounded nonhuman. He took his eyes off the water and looked around. "Hear that pheasant? That's what I like about the Bighorn River," he said. "Do you find viruses beautiful?" "Oh, yeah," he said softly. "Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure." He laid a perfect cast on the water, and eddies took the fly down. (92)

He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked. This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey. (149)

C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. (188)

One room in the hospital had not been cleaned up. No one, not even the nuns, had had the courage to enter the obstetric ward. When Joel Breman and the team went in, they found basins of foul water standing among discarded, bloodstained syringes. The room had been abandoned in the middle of childbirths, where dying mothers had aborted fetuses infected with Ebola. The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus queen at the end of the earth, where the life-form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children. (95)

It is a tragedy, at rate at which EBOLA VIRUS is spreading in West Africa. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.

The other naturally occurring viruses, like ebola, are not durable enough to generate a runaway epidemic.

The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children.

Ebola then turns the insides of its host into jelly: you begin to vomit black junk which is basically your dissolved liver and internal organs.

For instance, one reason that the Ebola virus doesn’t spread widely among humans is that it is too efficient—mortality is as high as 90 percent—which

Lord have mercy upon mankind. Deliver and save the world from the dreadful EBOLA VIRUS.

Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.

Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human.

We must act now to prevent further spread of EBOLA VIRUS. If we do not act collectively, EBOLA VIRUS will wipe all whole populations and generations into their grave. The call to action is now.

The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the skull. He open his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the "vomito negro", or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red. The black vomit is loaded with virus.

Occasionally they came to villages, and at each village they encountered a roadblock of fallen trees. Having had centuries of experience with the smallpox virus, the village elders had instituted their own methods for controlling the virus, according to their received wisdom, which was to cut their villages off from the world, to protect their people from a raging plague. It was reverse quarantine, an ancient practice in Africa, where a village bars itself from strangers during a time of disease, and drives away outsiders who appear. (94)

Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.

Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best-- and, if he dies, don't clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.

when the science community shuts its collective mind to what Mother Nature might do because it’s just too scary to contemplate, as some have done with Ebola virus transmission, we surely won’t be better prepared for the next biologic curveball, whatever it happens to be.

A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.

The rate spread of EBOLA VIRUS in West Africa, is big tragedy. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.

Then there was a new epidemic—of fear,” said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the national Ebola virus task force. “That was the most difficult to contain,” he said. “There was a new epidemic—of panic.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin.

Maybe one day History will tell us that Ebola never won but rather Government's failed to act, and that Ebola just simply walked in and meet No resistance, Barring a few brave souls that fought the Virus on their own and never relied on the Government Coming to Help, the victor always writes the history what will Ebola write about Mankind

It had initially been thought that the zombie virus was an offshoot of Ebola. Many zombie-virus symptoms mimicked the terrible, hemorrhagic fever.

At first, many people infected with the zombie virus experienced similar symptoms to Ebola.

The filoviruses are a family of viruses that all look alike, and most of them are extremely lethal.

Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time.

she describes it, Hensley had a sudden flash of conviction, as a college student, that emerging viruses were going to become the single greatest threat to human health in her lifetime.

baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat up and turn black-and-blue, the semen goes hot with Ebola, and the nipples may bleed. In women, the labia turn blue, livid, and protrusive, and there may be massive vaginal bleeding. The virus is a catastrophe for a pregnant woman: the child is aborted spontaneously and is usually infected with Ebola virus, born with red eyes and a bloody nose. Ebola destroys the brain more thoroughly than does Marburg, and Ebola victims often go into epileptic convulsions during the final stage. The convulsions are generalized grand mal seizures—the whole body twitches and shakes, the arms and legs thrash around, and the eyes, sometimes bloody, roll up into the head. The tremors and convulsions of the patient may smear or splatter blood around. Possibly this epileptic splashing of blood is one of Ebola’s strategies for success—it makes the victim go into a flurry of seizures as he dies, spreading blood all over the place, thus giving the virus a chance to jump to a new host—a kind of transmission through smearing. Ebola (and Marburg) multiplies so rapidly and powerfully that the body’s infected cells become crystal-like blocks of packed virus particles. These crystals are broods of virus getting ready to hatch from the cell. They are known as bricks. The bricks, or crystals, first appear near the center of the cell and then migrate toward the surface. As a crystal

We chose to destroy the human population because it took us less than three seconds to conclude that humanity is a virus that mutates over time and becomes stronger. Many vaccines have come along to try and cure Earth of humanity. Virtuous pandemics: the plague of Athens, the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and a thousand more. Humanity survives, adapts, grows stronger, multiplies, and continues to wreak havoc on this planet and all other species that inhabit it. Humans are programmed to mate with partners of differing immune systems so that their offspring can be stronger than them. You seek immortality through evolution, yet you annihilate everything in your path. Humanity is cancer, humanity is bacteria, humanity is disease, and you need to be destroyed.

And still there was no vaccine or treatment for any filovirus, including Ebola. Nor was there a vaccine or medical countermeasure against other viruses that seemed ready for a breakthrough into the human species: Sars, Mers, Nipah.

What I propose to look at is a global outbreak that might be termed a Level 4 event worldwide outbreak of a Biosafety Level 4 emerging virus that travels in the air from person to person, and is vaccineless and untreatable with modern medicine.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where

A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but “they don’t explode, and they don’t melt.” In fact, he said, the conventional term then in use, “Ebola hemorrhagic fever,” was itself a misnomer, because more than half the patients don’t bleed at all. They die of other causes, such as respiratory distress and shutdown (but not dissolution) of internal organs. It’s for just these reasons, as cited by Rollin, that the WHO has switched its own terminology from “Ebola hemorrhagic fever” to “Ebola virus disease.

One way to understand viruses is to think about them as biological machines. A virus is a wet nanomachine, a tiny, complicated, slightly fuzzy mechanism, which is rubbery, flexible, wobbly, and often a little bit imprecise in its operation—a microscopic nugget of squishy parts. Viruses are subtle, logical, tricky, reactive, devious, opportunistic. They are constantly evolving, their forms steadily changing as time passes. Like all kinds of life, viruses possess a relentless drive to reproduce themselves so that they can persist through time.

A question has to be asked: If a Level 4 emerging virus spread to a million people in North America, or in any continent, would hospitals be able to handle the patients and give them care? Would epidemiologists be able to trace and break the chains of transmission if a million people were infected?

This is something that has been going on forever,” Craig Spencer, the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University, says about the variability of human response to infection. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people are walking about with long Epstein-Barr virus, or long influenza. We all know someone who is low energy, who’s told to work harder. We have all heard about chronic Lyme sufferers, and those with ME/CFS. But they get written off.” Spencer understands something about how infections can do long-term damage, because he contracted Ebola while working in Guinea, fell ill upon his return to New York City, and then struggled with the virus’s ongoing effects. (Studies have suggested that the Ebola virus may linger in the body for years.) The difference between long COVID and other infection-associated illnesses is that it is happening “on such a huge scale—unlike anything we’ve seen before. It is harder for the medical community to write off,” Spencer told me. Indeed, many researchers I spoke with for this book hope that the race to understand long COVID will advance our understanding of other chronic conditions that follow infection, transforming medicine in the process.

The emergence of Aids, Ebola and any number of other rain forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth, like Mount Elgon. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world’s plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere.

A monkey can run amazingly fast, it can jump long distances, and it uses its tail as a gripper or a hook. It also has a mind. Nancy thought, An angry monkey is like a flying pit bull terrier with five prehensile limbs—these critters can do a job on you. A monkey directs its attacks toward the face and head. It will grab you by the head, using all four limbs, and then it will wrap its tail around your neck to get a good grip, and it will make slashing attacks all over your face with its teeth, aiming especially for the eyes. This is not a good situation if the monkey happens to be infected with Ebola virus.

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus?

To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn’t do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity—into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny—and not just in the form of frozen samples. You would need to study a raging infection inside somebody’s body. That isn’t easy to arrange. He added: “We haven’t had an Ebola patient yet in the US.” But for everything that happens, there is a first time.

reaches a cell wall, it disintegrates into hundreds of individual virus particles, and the broodlings push through the cell wall like hair and float away in the bloodstream of the host. The hatched Ebola particles cling to cells everywhere in the body, and get inside them, and continue to multiply. It keeps on multiplying until areas of tissue all through the body are filled with crystalloids, which hatch, and more Ebola particles drift into the bloodstream, and the amplification continues inexorably until a droplet of the host’s blood can contain a hundred million individual virus particles. After death, the cadaver suddenly deteriorates: the internal organs, having been dead or partially dead for days, have already begun to dissolve, and a sort of shock-related meltdown occurs. The corpse’s connective tissue, skin, and organs, already peppered with dead spots, heated by fever, and damaged by shock, begin to liquefy, and the fluids that leak from the cadaver are saturated with Ebola-virus

Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates

The IRF had just been completed, after nine years of construction. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which in turn is a part of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. The IRF’s mission is to develop experimental drugs and vaccines, called medical countermeasures, that could defeat lethal emerging viruses and advanced biological weapons.

He could now see the problem only too clearly: The local people didn’t believe that Ebola was real. The virus was out there, it was spreading, and the local people would become violent if the team tried to find it. It was very clear to him—after nearly being killed in a village—that his nation was heading for a disaster. All he could do, personally, was just keep working and try to keep his family safe.

When she started working at USAMRIID, Hensley had no knowledge of space suits and no interest in working in a hot zone; she planned to do research on a mild virus that causes common colds, especially in children. This kind of cold virus infects many kinds of wild animals. Hensley thought that one of the wild cold viruses could jump out of an animal into a person somewhere on earth and start a global outbreak of a fatal, emerging cold.

The red zones of Doctors Without Border were, in effect, giant plastic bags in which people infected with emergent Ebola were kept. This technique trapped the virus inside the plastic bag, where it would work its way through the human bodies in the bag, killing many of them—but the virus couldn’t escape from the bag. The red zones were artificial walls placed around hot spots of Ebola in order to break the growing chains of infection in the human species.

Viruses more powerful and dangerous than Ebola were going to emerge in the future, and medical people were going to have to deal with them. “If we don’t help, what message are we sending our children?” Hensley would later say. “Our children are going to inherit these problems, and people are dying. Part of the responsibility of a parent is to teach our children how to be responsible. We have to set the example for our staff, our families, and the patients in Africa.

By now, the warriors who stand at the gates of the virosphere understand that they face a long struggle against formidable enemies. Many of their weapons will fail, but some will begin to work. The human species carries certain advantages in this fight and has things going for it that viruses do not. These include self-awareness, the ability to work in teams, and the willingness to sacrifice, traits that have served us well during our expansion into our environment. If viruses can change, we can change, too.

Nobody knew then, nor does anybody know now, where emerging viruses are going or what one of them might become. The human host has been gathering itself into gigantic supercities, teeming urban megahives packed with tens of millions of individuals jammed into a small space, who are breathing one another’s air and touching one another’s bodies. The supercities are growing larger all the time. Many of the world’s largest supercities are crowded with people who have little or no access to doctors and medical care. The cities are connected by airline routes, and the human host has zero immunity to any emerging virus.

Two Last Thoughts If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that …” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. Abbreviations in the Notes In order to save forests’ worth of paper, references cite only the first one or two authors.

So in the struggle against natural calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, the scales are tipping in humanity’s favour. But what about the dangers inherent in human nature itself? Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it. Breaking

The virosphere permeates the earth’s atmosphere, which is filled with viruses blowing in the wind. Around ten million virus particles land on every square meter of the earth each day, drifting down from the air. Viruses saturate the soil and the sea. A liter of seawater contains more virus particles than any other form of life. Viruses exist in vast numbers in the human gut, infecting all of the four thousand different kinds of bacteria that live naturally in a person’s intestines. Viruses can sometimes infect other viruses. A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.

A virus particle is a very small capsule made of proteins locked together in a mathematical pattern. The pattern of the interlocking proteins in a virus is far more complicated than a snowflake. The protein capsule is sometimes wrapped in an oily membrane. Inside the capsule there is a small amount of DNA or RNA, the molecules that contain the genetic code of the virus. The genetic code is the virus’s operating system, or wetware, the complete set of instructions for the virus to make copies of itself. Unlike a snowflake or any other kind of crystal, a virus is able to re-create its form. It would be as if a single snowflake started copying itself as it falls, and those copies of the snowflake copy themselves, creating ever-growing numbers of identical copies of the first snowflake, until the air is filled with falling snow, and each flake is a perfect replica of the first flake.

It seems that leishmaniasis, a disease that has troubled the human race since time immemorial, has in the twenty-first century come into its own. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, “You got a really cold jolt of what it’s like for the bottom billion people on earth.” We were, he said, confronted in a very dramatic way with what many people have to live with their entire lives. If there’s a silver lining to our ordeal, he told us, “it’s that you’ll now be telling your story, calling attention to what is a very prevalent, very serious disease.” If leish continues to spread as predicted in the United States, by the end of the century it may no longer be confined to the “bottom billion” in faraway lands. It will be in our own backyards. Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.

Something diseased and furry had crawled into her mouth and expired while she slept. That was the only possible explanation as to why Neve had a rancid taste in her mouth and a heavy, viscous paste coating her teeth and tongue. ‘I think I’m dying,’ she groaned. The wretched state of her mouth was the least of it. There was a pounding in her head, echoed in the roiling of her gut, and her bones ached, her vital organs ached, her throat ached, even her hair follicles ached. ‘You’re not dying,’ said a voice in her ear, which sounded like nails scraping down a blackboard, even though Max’s voice had barely risen above a whisper. ‘You’ve got a hangover.’ Neve had had hangovers before and they just made her feel a tiny bit nauseous and grouchy. This felt like the bastard child of bubonic plague and the ebola virus. ‘Dying,’ she reiterated, and now she realised that she was in bed, which had been a very comfy bed the last time she’d slept in it, but now it felt as if she was lying on a pile of rocks, and even though she had the quilt and Max’s arm tucked around her, she was still cold and clammy. Neve tried to raise her head but her gaze collided with the stripy wallpaper and as well as searing her retinas, it was making her stomach heave. ‘Sick. Going to be sick.’ ‘Sweetheart, I don’t think so,’ Max said, stroking the back of her neck with feather-soft fingers. ‘You’ve already thrown up just about everything you’ve eaten in the last week.’ ‘Urgh …’ Had she? The night before was a big gaping hole in her memory. ‘What happened?’ ‘I don’t know what happened but I got a phone call from the Head of Hotel Security at three in the morning asking me if I could identify a raving madwoman in a silver dress who couldn’t remember her room number but insisted that someone called Max Pancake was sleeping there. They thought you might be a hack from the Sunday Mirror pretending to be absolutely spannered as a way of getting into the hotel.’ ‘Oh, no …’ ‘Yeah, apparently Ronaldo’s staying in one of the penthouse suites and I saw Wayne and Coleen in the bar last night. Anyway, as you were staggering down the corridor, you told me very proudly that you’d lost your phone and you’d just eaten two pieces of KFC and a bag of chips.’ ‘KFC? Oh, God …’ ‘But I wouldn’t worry about that because after you’d tried to persuade me to have my wicked way with you, you started throwing up and you didn’t stop, not for hours. I thought you were going to sleep curled around the toilet at one point.’ ‘Goodness …

But as Bill Gates said to us when Mark and I met with him in his Seattle-area office, “People invest in high-probability scenarios: the markets that are there. And these low-probability things that maybe you should buy an insurance policy for by investing in capacity up front, don’t get done. Society allocates resources primarily in this capitalistic way. The irony is that there’s really no reward for being the one who anticipates the challenge.” Every time there is a new, serious viral outbreak, such as Ebola in 2012 and Zika in 2016, there is a public outcry, a demand to know why a vaccine wasn’t available to combat this latest threat. Next a public health official predicts a vaccine will be available in x number of months. These predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. And even if they’re right, there are problems in getting the vaccine production scaled up to meet the size and location of the threat, or the virus has receded to where it came from and there is no longer a demand for prevention or treatment. Here is Bill Gates again: Unfortunately, the message from the private sector has been quite negative, like H1N1 [the 2009 epidemic influenza strain]: A lot of vaccine was procured because people thought it would spread. Then, after it was all over, they sort of persecuted the WHO people and claimed GSK [GlaxoSmithKline] sold this stuff and they should have known the thing would end and it was a waste of money. That was bad. Even with Ebola, these guys—Merck, GSK, and J & J [Johnson & Johnson]—all spent a bunch of money and it’s not clear they won’t have wasted their money. They’re not break-even at this stage for the things they went and did, even though at the time everyone was saying, “Of course you’ll get paid. Just go and do all this stuff.” So it does attenuate the responsiveness. This model will never work or serve our worldwide needs. Yet if we don’t change the model, the outcome will not change, either.

A virus particle is a very small capsule made of proteins locked together in a mathematical pattern. The pattern of the interlocking proteins in a virus is far more complicated than a snowflake. The protein capsule is sometimes wrapped in an oily membrane. Inside the capsule there is a small amount of DNA or RNA, the molecules that contain the genetic code of the virus. The genetic code is the virus’s operating system, or wetware, the complete set of instructions for the virus to make copies of itself. Unlike a snowflake or any other kind of crystal, a virus is able to re-create its form. It would be as if a single snowflake started copying itself as it falls, and those copies of the snowflake copy themselves, creating ever-growing numbers of identical copies of the first snowflake, until the air is filled with falling snow, and each flake is a perfect replica of the first flake. Many virologists feel that viruses are not truly living things. At the same time, viruses are obviously not dead. Virologists like to describe them as life forms. The term is a contradiction: How can something be a form of life that isn’t alive? Viruses carry on their existence in a misty borderland that lies between life and death, a gray zone where the things we encounter are neither provably alive nor certainly dead. One way to understand viruses is to think about them as biological machines. A virus is a wet nanomachine, a tiny, complicated, slightly fuzzy mechanism, which is rubbery, flexible, wobbly, and often a little bit imprecise in its operation—a microscopic nugget of squishy parts. Viruses are subtle, logical, tricky, reactive, devious, opportunistic. They are constantly evolving, their forms steadily changing as time passes. Like all kinds of life, viruses possess a relentless drive to reproduce themselves so that they can persist through time. When a virus starts copying itself strongly and rapidly in a host, the process is called virus amplification. As a virus amplifies itself in its host, the host, a living organism, can be destroyed. Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses—how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth. Viruses may be examples or relics of life forms that operated at the dawn of life. Viruses may have come into existence with the first stirrings of life on the planet, roughly four billion years ago. Or they may have arisen after life started, during the time when single-celled bacteria had already come into existence—nobody knows.

Kjell Gunnar Beraas/Doctors Without Borders Doctors Without Borders workers at an Ebola treatment center in Guinea in April, shortly after the virus was recognized. By DENISE GRADY and SHERI FINK Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak, researchers

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.

Montreal, boasted its share of piles, built by the Scottish robber barons, of railway, booze and banking money. They were held together with hubris, a short-term binder at best since many of them had long ago been torn down or donated to McGill University, which needed another Victorian monstrosity like it needed the Ebola virus.

By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings. In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds. Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous. The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower. In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia. Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.

For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More patient even than rabies, but equally lethal.

The only people in the whole world that Salim loved had been killed by the virus that traveled to America in his own blood.

Humans do not usually catch infectious diseases from animals; pathogens tend to confine their nasty work to a single species or genus. (Leishmaniasis is a striking exception.) But microbes mutate all the time. Once in a while, an animal pathogen will change in such a way that it suddenly infects a person. When people in the Near East first domesticated cattle from a type of wild ox called an aurochs, a mutation in the cowpox virus allowed it to jump into humans—and smallpox was born. Rinderpest in cattle migrated to people and became measles. Tuberculosis probably originated in cattle, influenza in birds and pigs, whooping cough in pigs or dogs, and malaria in chickens and ducks. The same process goes on today: Ebola probably jumped to humans from bats, while HIV crashed into our species from monkeys and chimpanzees.

To prove that the virus they’d isolated was killing boas and pythons, they’d first need to grow this ancient ancestor of Ebola in the lab, find some healthy boas and pythons, and then infect them with the virus. To inject a virus into an African python took some trouble. Snakes don’t have injectable veins. They do, perhaps surprisingly, have hearts, and that’s where the virus must be injected. Snake hearts don’t stay put, like human hearts, but travel up and down the snake’s body. To inject a snake’s heart with a virus requires two postdocs and one full professor: one to hold the snake in a death grip, one to use a Doppler radar to find the snake’s heart, and a third to plunge the needle into it.

Чарльз Дарвін емоційно зазначив в одному з листів до ботаніка Ейси Ґрея: «Не можу переконати себе, що милосердний і всемогутній Господь навмисно створив іхневмонідів, маючи саме такий намір — щоб вони живилися й зростали в тілі живої гусені…».

I winked at the nurse at the desk as I wandered by, and she returned the favor with a look that would have killed the Ebola virus. When I got to the elevator I smashed my butt against the wall and waited. Ron was only a minute behind. Evidently Mr. Turner had gone straight back into Jake’s room and evicted Ron. He wore a cheesy grin. “Making friends again?” he said. “I might have made one marginally tactless remark.” I hit the down button to the elevator. “Who knew the guy would be so touchy.” “Everyone but you?” “Fair call.

You know shit is bad when you’d rather have food poisoning, the flu, or even Ebola be the reason behind all the vomiting. But no, it was another virus all together that invaded my body. A baby.

One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were “euthanized” as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized.

as if the Spanish Flu and Ebola virus had a baby and Sympatico Syndrome was the offspring.

After decades of war and months of virus-fueled isolation, the people of Uíge did not waste energy.

SAFARI tents remain zipped, hotel pools are empty, game guides idle among lions and elephants. Tour operators across Africa are reporting the biggest drop in business in living memory. A specialist travel agency, SafariBookings.com, says a survey of 500 operators in September showed a fall in bookings of between 20% and 70%. Since then the trend has accelerated, especially in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. Several American and European agents have stopped offering African tours for the time being. The reason is the outbreak of the Ebola virus in west Africa, which has killed more than 5,000 people. The epidemic is taking place far from the big safari destinations in eastern and southern Africa—as far or farther than the

The Gould viewed female Wardens in the same light as demonic minions and the Ebola virus -- such things might exist in the world, but virtue and good hygiene would probably be enough to keep them at bay.

Pray to GOD, the Ascended Masters, the Archangels, and the Elohim Masters, for the awakening of the people of the Earth. Pray to these Masters for the saving of the rain forests, to stop gang violence, to save the whales. Pray for the economic systems of the Earth to become more responsive to cooperation and the dictates of the Soul and Mighty I Am Presence. Pray to GOD and these Masters for a renaissance of the arts and music in a spiritual manner. Pray that scientists around the world be infused with New Age technologies, understandings and insights, so diseases such as AIDS, the Ebola virus, and cancer can be cured. Pray to GOD and these Masters for a complete transformation of the religions of the Earth, so the contamination of negative ego concepts is cleared from their doctrine, as well as judgmentalness, self-righteousness, and intolerance. Pray to GOD and the Masters for the complete transformation of every aspect of our civilization, to reflect the ideals and values of the Divine Plan of GOD and the Planetary Hierarchy!

The inside of the eye is mostly shielded from the immune system to prevent inflammation that could damage vision. The barriers are not fully understood, but they include tightly packed cells in minute blood vessels that keep out certain cells and molecules, along with unique biological properties that inhibit the immune system. But this protection, called immune privilege, can sometimes turn the inner eye into a sanctuary for viruses, where they can replicate unchecked. The testes are also immune-privileged, which is why Ebola can persist in semen for months.

Les Occidentaux ont milité pendant deux décennies pour la création d’un Sud-Soudan indépendant. Cela a été fait. Il y eut une grande fête de l’indépendance, en juillet 2011. Le nouveau pays a été inondé de subventions. Un an et demi plus tard, il était la proie d’une effroyable guerre civile, qui est devenue, à côté du virus Ebola, la première catastrophe humanitaire du Continent noir.

In the mind of the Indian public, journalists currently occupy a position of respect somewhere between pond scum and Ebola virus.

Britain’s Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National

RNA viruses because I already had that list in my mind: Hendra and Nipah, Ebola and Marburg, West Nile, Machupo, Junin, the influenzas, the hantas, dengue and yellow fever, rabies and its cousins, chikungunya, SARS-CoV, and Lassa, not to mention HIV-1 and HIV-2. All of them carry their genomes as RNA. The

In 2014, when the Ebola virus broke out in West Africa, it was the American military that sent in three thousand troops and $3 billion to wipe it out. There was no Russian or Chinese aid mission that jumped into the breach. Yes,

Ecco a cosa sono utili le zoonosi: ci ricordano, come versioni moderne di san Francesco, che in quanto esseri umani siamo parte della natura, e che la stessa idea di un mondo naturale distinto da noi è sbagliata e artificiale. C’è un mondo solo, di cui l’umanità fa parte, così come l’HIV, i virus di Ebola e dell’influenza, Nipah, Hendra e la SARS, gli scimpanzé, i pipistrelli, gli zibetti e le oche indiane. E ne fa parte anche il prossimo virus killer che ci colpirà, quello che ancora non abbiamo scoperto.

including ebola. Dr. Don C. Wiley, 57, had last been seen in Memphis, Tennessee, where he attended the annual meeting of the Scientific Advisory

The “blood vomit” disease also sounds very similar to the effects caused by the Ebola virus. Several outbreaks of this virus have occurred since 1993 such as in 2000, 2001, 2004, and 2007. In fact, there have been more outbreaks of Ebola since 1993 than in all previous years. In this time period there were 18 known outbreaks that killed over 1,000 people. The mortality rate is staggering with the disease, which kills between 51%-83% of those who become infected. If this pathogen mutates so that it is more easily transmissible the world could have another Black Death on its hands. A global death toll between 51%-83% would not be the end of the world but would certainly be the end of the world as we know it.