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National Geographic : 2015 Jul
Contents
Ebola 59 suggests, he said, that the sequence of events yielding spillover has to be “extraordinary and weird.” Highly unusual circumstances, an un- likely convergence of factors. Second, there’s “the remarkable genome stability of the virus over the years.” It didn’t change much, didn’t evolve much, at least until the human case count in West Africa started going so high, pro- viding many more opportunities for the virus to mutate. That stability might reflect “a bot- tleneck somewhere,” Kuhn said—a constrain- ing situation that keeps the virus scarce and its genetic diversity low. One possible form of bottleneck would be a two-host system: a mam- mal host such as a bat species that becomes infected only intermittently, when it gets bitten by a certain insect or tick or other arthropod, perhaps relatively rare or narrowly distributed, which is the ultimate host of the virus. As we both knew, this harked back to that hitchhiker in Rhodesia in 1975 who suffered an odd little bite and then died of Marburg. It evoked the spider in Bob Swanepoel’s lab that carried Ebo- la for two weeks. What would you do, I asked him, if you had a big research grant for nothing but finding Ebo- la’s reservoir? Kuhn laughed. “I’m going to make myself unpopular,” he said, “but I would still look into insects and other arthropods.” He doesn’t have that big grant, nor does any- one else. The mystery remains. The stakes are high. The samples from Ivory Coast have so far yielded no positives. The search continues. j While on assignment for this story, photographer Pete Muller also shot four stories about West Africa’s Ebola outbreak for nationalgeographic.com. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. but it’s so dangerous to be in a house with some- body who is actively sick and still alive. There are certain things that are just really inadvisable to do. Did fear of catching the virus ever prevent you from getting close to your subjects? Yes. I thought it would be pow- erful to show home care, ONE MORE THING REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF
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