The Ebola virus seems to have just appeared out of nowhere, and just as quickly , it has become epidemic.Four thousand persons have lost their lives, mainly in Liberia – where we first learned about it. And health officials don’t appear to be any closer to learning more about how it is contracted. Is it airborne? Is it similar to AIDS, where one must be in contact with an affected persons’ fluids? Do you have to be in “direct” contact…and how close is ‘direct’?
According to the World Health Organization, the epidemic has a 70 percent mortality rate, and it is said to leave survivors immune to the strain that sickened them.
Survivors?
We know about the American survivors; those who returned from Liberia after helping tend to the affected there. All white. All survived. We know that a nurse that tended to Thomas Eric Duncan, the black man who traveled from Liberia to Dallas – and died days later. We also know about two nurses who contracted Ebola, one who had tended to Mr. Duncan has now been diagnosed. But what we are just now learning is that not everyone who carried the virus in Liberia, died from it.
