Ebola Patient Zero Identified, Probably Infected By Bats 112
BarbaraHudson writes The CBC is reporting that scientists have possibly found the source of Patient Zero's Ebola infection. From the story: "Patient Zero, two-year-old Guinean Emile Ouamouno, may have been infected while hunting or playing with bats inside a hollow tree near his home in a small village named Meliandou. The study determined Ouamouno's interaction with bats is the likely cause of transmission by ruling out other possibilities, namely that the virus was spread by the consumption of bushmeat. Only children and women presented symptoms or died in the beginning of the current epidemic. Research published in the EMBO Molecular Medicine journal finds that the single transmission, from bat to boy, was then spread human to human."
Re:Finger pointer??? WTF???? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not finger pointing. Knowing who your patient zero was is absolutely vital if you want to be able to reduce the likelihood of future outbreaks.
Ebola doesn't have a natural reservoir in the human population; it's too fast-acting and (with the exception of the Reston strain) deadly for that. It tends to have a similar effect on other primates as well. So identifying where the disease does live between outbreaks in the human population (likely in a species which experiences no or limited symptoms from infection) is critical, both for research purposes (the ability to keep an eye on the virus before its latest strain jumps into humans) or for educating people as to which particular pools of the animal population to stay away from.
If you go back through medical history - right back to bubonic plague having a natural reservoir in rats' fleas - identifying how a virus has been making the jump into humans has been the first stage in controlling it.
Re:What's odd is that (Score:4, Informative)
The bats aren't as sensitive to Ebola as humans. Probably because they have had this disease among them for a long time.
The Black Death during medieval times was worst the first time around, the second and third time it wasn't as deadly because the survivors from the first hit had the opportunity to spread their genes while those that perished obviously hadn't.
And it's still not entirely clear if Black Death really was Yersina Pestis or something else.
In any case - as long as a disease don't have 100% lethality there will be survivors with better genes improving the genetic stock.
Re:What's odd is that (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, and how exactly do you imagine evolution works? It's just random mutation and not-quite-so-random death. If you have an advantage that delays your death, but don't breed during the respite, then you are irrelevant to that aspect of evolution. But that's very rare - sex is typically a lifelong interest, and males remain fertile indefinitely while humans and orcas are the only known mammals where the females eventually become infertile. Pretty much everything else breeds until death. If you have a trait that reduces your interest in sex, then it will almost certainly be bred out of the population - unless it's genetically linked to something that provides a corresponding advantage to yourself or your close relatives. The selective pressure will obviously be less on age-related changes, which won't start manifesting until most of your breeding opportunities are behind you.
Basically, we don't need to know why someone survived a plague - it's enough that they did: there will be at least a slightly higher concentration of "useful" genes for surviving the disease among the survivors than there was originally, and thus almost certainly a greater concentration of those genes in the next generation. After the same basic species of disease sweeps through a population a few thousand times pretty much everyone still surviving will have many disease-resistant genes.