Ebola, and the two important stages of the viral illness...Yes, it is tied to something much bigger.

In contagious diseases there are (generally) fives stages of disease. The fifth stage is generally unstated as it is death. Where ebola is concerned we will only focus on three stages, but will combine the prodromal stage (itchy, runny nose, dry eyes, etc.), and the peak (clinical) stage (the disease reaches its highest point of development, severe aches, organ failure, hemorrhaging, etc.) We will refer to this combined stage as the "symptomatic" stage. I am not taking liberties with medical terms. I have it on good authority that this is perfectly acceptable as an explanatory measure.

The first phase is the asymptomatic stage commonly referred to as the incubation stage.

The issue with ebola in very densely populated areas is that ebola is transmissible as early as two days after contagion, and can remain contagious to others for in excess of three weeks in our combined symptomatic stage. How much longer than three weeks may not be precisely known given the 350 mutations of the current ebola strain currently affecting West Africa. The strain is most closely related to the strain formerly known as Ebola Zaire(Z-EBOV). This is not a mere academic exercise. The background is important to get one's head around what is happening in Monrovia, Liberia.

In Monrovia, no one knows to do about ebola. The piece is a good Q&A session. Perhaps the most daunting bits are these:

Q: How do you see events unfolding?

A: I am not optimistic about the immediate future. We're facing a lack of outside support, and a broken-down state trying to do what it can with what it has - which is not much. For me there's no doubt the number of cases will explode in the upcoming weeks and months.

The rainy season is on its way, and the mosquitos will be coming out. Then we'll see an explosion in the number of cases of malaria. This is not going to be easy: there's a risk of mixing up malaria and Ebola, since the symptoms are similar.

Q: You are in charge of the construction of Ebola clinics. Explain exactly what this entails.

A: My job is to set up 500 beds. I think I'll be done in a month. There are a lot of technical issues to consider - how a plot of land is laid out, how big and how accessible it is.

You need 5 000 square metres (5 400 square feet) for a 100-bed clinic - not easy to find in a big city like Monrovia, with marshy terrain. And the heavy rains are an enormous obstacle, as is the high water table which makes it impossible to dig latrines and is forcing us to build septic tanks out of concrete.

Things are dire, and looking to get a lot more dire in the months ahead.

The above was pulled as a blockquote, so I did not fix the metres sq. to feet sq. issue. The corrected data will read: 5,000 square metres (54,000 square feet). The lack of an "e" when pluralizing "mosquito" may be accurate for the region. The malaria-ebola symptom similarities really call for instant pathogen identification. This is medically practical as ebola is caused by a virus, and malaria is caused by single celled parasites of the protozoa plasmodium. The plasmodium parasite is viewable via common light microscopes, whilst viewing ebolavirus particles requires electron microscopy.


However, there are easier ways..the Malaria antigen detection tests can be performed by health workers otherwise unskilled in complex laboratory procedures. Of course even perfect detection/rejection rates--and no method is 100% accurate--will not suffice for people carrying both pathogens. Or for people with Lassa virus which presents much the same as ebola.

It is quite likely that the answerer to the questions--WHO staffer Jean-Pierre Veyrenche--is correct in stating what he did. How do you build a health system in a plague ridden place where time is of the essence and there's little to no supporting infrastructure? Things really are seemingly out of control.

One more after that marathon..

West Africa: Health Experts Call for Gender Specific Approach in Fight Against Ebola. This is a really progressive step. Unless I am mistakened, women have suffered disproportionately in all previous ebola outbreaks as women care for the sick, and are much more involved in preparing the dead for burial. These are two flashpoints for contagion. A wee bit:

"When we collect data and disaggregate the people infected with Ebola by age and gender we can see that up to 75 percent of all new cases are among women," Elias told MediaGlobal News in an exclusive interview. "That indicates that in order to intervene we need gender intentionality in our programming."

In individual case reports that I have read pregnant women are especially susceptible to ebola--and other contagions--as during pregnancy a woman's immunity is low so that the fetus can grow inside the womb without triggering an immune response to a foreign body. I know with a high level of certainty that the latter of the premise is true, so it is more than reasonable that the former is as well.