Via The Washington Post: Deep in the jungle, hunting for the next Ebola outbreak. Excerpt:
NOUABALE-NDOKI NATIONAL PARK, Congo Republic — More than 3,000 miles from the fading Ebola crisis in West Africa, a team of U.S.-funded researchers is hunting deep in a remote rain forest for the next outbreak.
They aren’t looking for infected people. They’re trying to solve one of science’s great mysteries: Where does Ebola hide between human epidemics?
The answer appears to lie in places such as this — vast tracts of African jungle where gorillas, bats and other animals suspected of spreading the virus share a shrinking ecosystem. If scientists can pinpoint the carriers, and how Ebola is transmitted between them, future epidemics will be easier to anticipate — or even prevent.
The mission is urgent. Based on the pattern of previous outbreaks, the next one probably isn’t far away.
The world was shocked by the most recent epidemic, which has killed more than 10,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. But it was hardly the first. Over the past 40 years, Ebola has exploded sporadically in sub-Saharan Africa, wiping out scores of people. It has also quietly decimated wildlife populations. As many as a third of the world’s gorillas have died of the disease.
Scientists are more anxious than ever to figure out why the virus has flared in some places but not others. And so, on a recent humid Sunday morning, a 51-year-old wildlife veterinarian from Michigan loaded his gear into a leaky dugout canoe and headed with his team into the Congo River Basin.
They swatted away swarms of flies and bees as they paddled to the end of the river and then trekked for miles through the brush. They were seeking one of the animals suspected of harboring Ebola: the red river hog.
If the researchers captured one of the wild pigs and it tested positive for Ebola, it would confirm decades of hypotheses and help scientists start to map the disease. It would also be a frightening prospect — a sign that the virus was again ready to pounce on a human population.
