Ebola

Scientists think they've found
Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak
A new study suggests the origin of the worldwide
Ebola outbreak was a two-year-old African boy
who passed away last year.
Image: Festa/Shutterstock
A toddler in Africa may have started the Ebola
outbreak, which the World Health Organisation
has now delcared an international public health
emergency, according to research published in
The New England Journal of Medicine .
The two-year-old boy identified as Patient Zero
died on 6 December 2013 in a village in
Guéckédou in southeastern Guinea in Africa. The
region borders Sierra Leone and Liberia, making
it an ideal entry point for an epidemic.
There have since been at least 1,779 cases of
the disease, as Denise Grady and Sheri Fink
explain in The New York Times, and 961
deaths - including the boy's mother, sister and
grandmother.
At the time of their deaths, no one was sure
what had sickened the family, despite the fever,
vomiting and diarrhoea characteristic of the
disease, so no special procedures were put into
place when it came to treating them. And, within
a few weeks, the study shows that contaminated
healthcare workers who had supported the family
and mourners at their funerals then spread the
disease to surrounding villages and hospitals. By
early March it had appeared across southern
Guinea. Cases have now been reported in
Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The international team of researchers managed
to trace the disease's origins by looking at the
way the new strain spread through Africa.
Although the toddler and his family were never
officially diagnosed with Ebola, their symptoms
match the disease and, according to The New
York Times, "fit into a pattern of transmission
that included other cases confirmed by blood
tests".
However, the scientists still aren't sure how the
boy would have caught Ebola in the first place.
Sylvain Baize, part of the team that analysed the
Guinea outbreak and a researcher at the Pasteur
Institute in Lyon, France, told Grady and Fink at
The New York Times that there might have
been an earlier undiscovered case prior to the
young boy.
“We suppose that the first case was infected
following contact with bats,” Blaize said.
“Maybe, but we are not sure.”
So how did this Ebola outbreak get so out of
control, when we've generally been able to get a
hold of them quite quickly in the past? Grady
and Fink explain it's a combination of a lack of
infrastructure and hygiene, increased travel and
modernisation in Africa, and the fact that
healthcare workers in West Africa simply weren't
prepared to deal with the disease, and didn't
know the symptoms.