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Ebola: we don’t have time to waste
















Ebola: a poor example of disease transmission, but maybe that’s not an accident

Ebola2I’m reading through news about the American rights hijacking of the Ebola crisis for their own political gain. Did this outbreak have to occur right before the midterms, and right before a Senate election? The awful toll it will take on West African states aside, the virus couldn’t have picked a worse time (or a better, depending on how you look at it).

Ebola is a scary virus, assuming that one ever has the misfortune to come into contact with it. “Contact” in this case, means that you have to have direct contact with the blood, feces or vomit of a person infected and symptomatic with Ebola. Unfortunately for the virus, people don’t really live that long once they become symptomatic with the disease and the people who survive appear to be immune to it

This is a terrible model for an infectious pathogen. The symptoms are so severe that all around the person will immediately run away (except health workers, who bear the brunt of the risk) and the host doesn’t live very long providing only a short window with which to infect other hosts.

So the duration of infectiousness is short, the pathways are really awful and repeat infections are unlikely.

To put this into perspective, looks at the most successful pathogens out there, pathogens like influenza. Influenza transmits easily, nearly two thirds of those infected show no symptoms and thus can happily shed viral particles to everyone they know undetected. When symptoms do occur, they aren’t so bad as to keep every outside of a 5 miles radius of you. Influenza mutates at an incredible rate, so that a single infection doesn’t provide much protection against later infections. Even better, though its rapid mutation rate sometimes leads to horribly virulent strains like the 1918 flu pandemic which killed millions, in most cases influenza spares a healthy host.

It has developed an incredibly efficient and effective survival strategy (and for this reason is far scarier than Ebola).

So I’ve been thinking of how a virus like Ebola might persist in the wild, given it’s odd mode of transmission.

Now, we know that Ebola is a zoonotic disease, that is, it is transmitted from animal to humans. Since humans have not developed genetic resistance to the disease, we are at particular risk for its worst effects. Many of the scariest diseases out there are zoonoses. Examples would include HIV, SARS and, of course, influenza. While not always true, we tend to make peace with pathogens that are old and exclusively human. Many of the bacteria which live happily in your gut would be examples. As we haven’t had sufficient time to make peace with Ebola or HIV, the outcomes can be far worse than those seen in their normal hosts.

Thus, it is possible that Ebola is far less serious in whatever host it is adapted for. Nipa virus, which has a case fatality rate (the percentage of all infections of a pathogen which result in death) of more than 90% does nothing to the fruit bats it happily resides in. It is possible that Ebola is also harmless to whatever host it depends on.

However, it is possible that Ebola might be harmless in some hosts, while deadly in others, and this difference might be the result of a successful evolutionary adaptation.

Ebola has been pegged as residing in bats possibly explaining its wide range over central Africa. [1-6] Bats are a pathogens dream. They multiply quickly, providing ample opportunities for transmission and for evolutionary adaptations to the pathogen which might insure its long term survival. Better yet, they fly so that pathogens can disperse themselves quickly over a large geographic space. This is particularly useful if the pathogens wants to maintain healthy genetic diversity (though the creation of multiple sub-populations) and if it can infect multiple hosts which may or may not be all that mobile.

Apes would be a good example of the latter. Apes, being fairly sensitive to environmental changes, don’t like to move around a whole lot (unlike humans which are highly adaptable to just about any environment on the planet) but still might be important to the survival of the pathogen.

Ebola has been found in apes and the disease is currently devastating local populations.[4, 7-10]

And this is where I get stuck. In nature, plenty of things happen for no reason at all, but with pathogens, even accidental occurrences can have implications for survival and are often part of the tool box with which diseases evolve and persist.

A bleeding ape on a forest floor will likely kill all of its relatives in quick fashion, assuming its family doesn’t just hightail it out in which case transmission is over anyway. But the dead ape might serve an important purpose. Predators and scavengers will quickly arrive to feast on the infected corpse, transmitting the virus to carnivorous animals all around the forest. This could provide ample opportunities for transmission to other species. Even though many of these species could be poor hosts for the disease, they could also represent new opportunities for survival.

HIV would be an example of this. From HIV’s standpoint (assuming a collective viral consciousness), the jump to humans was extremely fortuitous. Humans love to have sex with multiple people, often even after having already reproduced, and physiologically they proved resistant enough to allow the virus to hang out for a few years before dying, allowing for years of transmission possibilities.

Thus, while on the surface, blood based modes of transmission seem pretty useless, they could serve a larger purpose of insuring a pathogens survival on a macro-level. In the case of HIV, humans didn’t turn into a dead end host (as they are with diseases like Brucella) but rather a new opportunity for survival.

The deadly nature of the virus in apes and humans, then might be like an insurance policy. Like a retirement portfolio, a diversified package of stocks will keep you alive in retirement much better than a portfolio with a single stock. Work has been done on pathogens which infect multiple species, and, depending on the nature of the pathogen, species diversity can either work for or against the survival of the pathogen.[11-13]

In the case of Ebola, there is no real evidence that humans play a role in sustaining transmission, but blood and predation could be sustaining something like Brucella or Q Fever in the wild.

Now, in this article, I have rambled on and bored you to death (and bless you if you made it this far) but I have to point out that I am under no illusions that pathogens act consciously, though I have like many of my colleagues present it as such. Actually, no living thing really does have a long term plan outside of its narrow goals of producing offspring. But new opportunities for transmission do present new opportunities for the long term evolutionary survival or a biological entity. These lucky occurrences are not consciously sought out, but rather enable the pathogen to do what it does successfully.

It must be said that the ecology of Ebola is somewhat of a mystery. Not much work has been done on the subject, as the pathogen hides out in some of the most inaccessible areas of the planet, and conflict and political instability in places like the Central African Republic and Northern Uganda prevent researchers from doing extensive work on the pathogen.

1. Stan D: Ebola and Fruit Bats. Clinical Infectious Diseases 2006, 42(5):V.
2. Olival KJ, Islam A, Yu M, Anthony SJ, Epstein JH, Khan SA, Khan SU, Crameri G, Wang L-F, Lipkin WI et al: Ebola virus antibodies in fruit bats, bangladesh. Emerging infectious diseases 2013, 19(2):270.
3. Hayman DTS, Yu M, Crameri G, Wang L-F, Suu-Ire R, Wood JLN, Cunningham AA: Ebola virus antibodies in fruit bats, Ghana, West Africa. Emerging infectious diseases 2012, 18(7):1207.
4. Kumulungui B, Leroy EM, Swanepoel R, Gonzalez J-P, Pourrut X, Rouquet P, Yaba P, Paweska JT, Délicat A, Hassanin A: Fruit bats as reservoirs of Ebola virus. Nature 2005, 438(7068):575.
5. Vogel G: Infectious disease. Are bats spreading Ebola across sub-Saharan Africa? Science (New York, NY) 2014, 344(6180):140.
6. Hayman DTS, Emmerich P, Yu M, Wang L-F, Suu-Ire R, Fooks AR, Cunningham AA, Wood JLN: Long-term survival of an urban fruit bat seropositive for Ebola and Lagos bat viruses. PloS one 2010, 5(8):e11978.
7. Groseth A, Feldmann H, Strong JE: The ecology of Ebola virus. Trends in microbiology 2007, 15(9):408.
8. Vogel G: Ecology. Tracking Ebola’s deadly march among wild apes. Science (New York, NY) 2006, 314(5805):1522.
9. Leroy EM, Rouquet P, Formenty P, Souquière S, Kilbourne A, Froment J-M, Bermejo M, Smit S, Karesh W, Swanepoel R et al: Multiple Ebola Virus Transmission Events and Rapid Decline of Central African Wildlife. Science 2004, 303(5656):387.
10. Walsh PD, Biek R, Real LA: Wave-like spread of Ebola Zaire. PLoS biology 2005, 3(11):e371.
11. Renwick AR, White PCL, Bengis RG: Bovine tuberculosis in southern African wildlife: a multi-species host–pathogen system. Epidemiology and Infection 2007, 135(4):529.
12. Dobson A, Meagher M: The population dynamics of brucellosis in the Yellowstone National Park. Ecology 1996, 77(4):1026.
13. Dobson A: Population Dynamics of Pathogens with Multiple Host Species. The American Naturalist 2004, 164(S5):S64.


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