Ebola Tamed-- for Now

Last spring’s plague movie, Outbreak, had to compete with a real- life cliff-hanger: an appearance, in Zaire, of the dread Ebola virus. It came to the attention of health authorities in early May, after a sick laboratory technician died in a 350-bed hospital in Kikwit, a city of just over half a million people 186 miles east of Kinshasa. Before he died, the technician had gone through two abdominal operations, infecting the medical staff who took care of him. His symptoms--high temperature, headache, vomiting, and a rash that announced massive internal bleeding--were characteristic of the viral hemorrhagic fever group, which includes yellow fever, dengue, and hantavirus as well as Ebola. In its worst previous human visitation (also in Zaire, in 1976), Ebola virus achieved a death rate near 90 percent. There’s no vaccine, no cure. So when the Kikwit pathogen was identified as Ebola virus, health authorities and the media ...