Ebola is a filovirus that causes Ebola virus disease (EVD), the deadliest of a dozen hemorrhagic fever diseases. Mortality rates in previous Ebola epidemics ranged between sixty and ninety percent.                 The natural reservoir of Ebola virus is the African fruit bat. Occasionally the virus passes from bats to other forest mammals that are killed for bush meat. Touching or skinning infected animals during hunting or food preparation and bat feces can transmit the virus to humans. Transmission is rare but frequent enough to cause periodic outbreaks that can spread. The 2014-2015 epidemic in West Africa began with patient zero – a two-year-old boy in Gueckedou, Guinea infected while playing in bat feces-infested soil below a hollow tree where a colony of bats nested. Perhaps he picked up a dead bat. Delivering         ...

The Ebola virus has engulfed three countries in West Africa frightening societies and wrecking economies. This epidemic and those that are certain to come more often in the future threaten the entire world. While Ebola is not contagious – it is not spread through the air – it is highly infectious. Even touching the body of someone who has died from Ebola can infect a person. Between 20% and 50% of all cases have been traced to contact with the bodies of deceased Ebola victims, often at funeral ceremonies. If medicines can be found that reduce the mortality rate in Ebola virus disease (EVD) this will have a knock-on effect reducing postmortem transmissions and significantly slow the spread of the epidemic. It will also encourage people to seek medical attention at Ebola treatment units (ETUs) sooner. That will reduce transmissions too. After Ebola struck, international health organizations eventually descended en mass to fight the virus with the best weapons they knew – mostly rehydr...

               “THERE IS NO TREATMENT, THERE IS NO CURE” …well, that is not entirely true.             The heroic organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the physicians at other Ebola treatment units (ETUs) in West Africa provide a minimal form of treatment called “supportive care” for patients with Ebola virus disease (EVD). This includes keeping patients hydrated with water containing electrolytes, giving antibiotic drugs to help prevent secondary infections, painkillers and antimalarial drugs. This increases an Ebola patient’s chance of survival from only 10% in the absence of such care, to an average of 45%. But basic supportive care does not include any drug therapy targeted directly at the virus itself – no antiviral medication.                Two days after I arrived in Monrovia, Liberia from South Africa for the s...