Paul Ewald knew from the beginning that the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire would fizzle out. On May 26, after eight days in which only six new cases were reported, that fizzle became official. The World Health Organization announced it would no longer need to update the Ebola figures daily (though sporadic cases continued to be reported until June 20).
The virus had held Zaire’s Bandundu Province in its deadly grip for weeks, infecting some 300 people and killing 80 percent of them. Most of those infected hailed from the town of Kikwit.
It was all just as Ewald predicted. When the Ebola outbreak occurred, he recalls, I said, as I have before, these things are going to pop up, they’re going to smolder, you’ll have a bad outbreak of maybe 100 or 200 people in a hospital, maybe you’ll have the outbreak slip into another isolated community, but then it will peter out on its own.
Ewald is no soothsayer. He’s an evolutionary biologist at Amherst College in Massachusetts and perhaps the world’s leading expert on how infectious diseases--and the organisms that cause them--evolve. He’s also a force behind what some are touting as the next great medical revolution: the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the understanding of human diseases.
