More African regions face Ebola risk from animals
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SCIENTISTS have created a new map of places most at risk of an Ebola outbreak and say regions likely to be home to animals harboring the virus are more widespread than previously feared, particularly in West Africa.
Understanding better where people come into contact with Ebola-infected animals — for example through hunting or eating bush meat — and how to stop them contracting the deadly disease, is crucial to preventing future outbreaks, the researchers said.
The Ebola virus, which can have a human mortality rate of up to 90 percent, is thought to be carried by bats or other wild animals and believed to cross into humans through contact with blood, meat or other infected fluids. These jumps by viruses from animals to humans are known as “zoonotic events” and were the cause of major human disease outbreaks such as HIV and the H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
The new map, published yesterday as the death toll in the West Africa Ebola outbreak, the world’s largest, stood at almost 2,100, found that large swathes of central Africa as well as the western part of the continent have traits of what the scientists called “the zoonotic niche” for Ebola.
Nick Golding, an Oxford University researcher who worked on the international mapping team, said it found significantly more regions at risk from Ebola than previously feared.
“Up until now there hadn’t been a huge amount of research, but there was one paper in which the at-risk area was much smaller,” he said.
“It didn’t predict, for example, the area in Guinea where this current outbreak first started.”
Golding’s study, published in the journal eLife as a collaboration by scientists at Oxford and University of Southampton in Britain, Canada’s University of Toronto, and HealthMap at Boston Children’s Hospital in the United States, did not seek to map potential human-to-human spread, but focussed on where there is a risk of animals infecting people.
Previous studies have shown that the first patient in an Ebola outbreak is very probably infected through contact with an infected animal. The so-called “index case” in the current Congo outbreak was, according to the WHO, a pregnant woman from Ikanamongo Village who butchered a bush animal that had been killed and given to her by her husband.
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