The PHEIC Ebola outbreak making it to the "news"
Why you don't have to be concerned
Ah Ebola. Tis the season for fear-mongering about this insanely interesting virus to commence. I am sure you’ve seen something about it in the legacy media to date.
I made a post on X in response to a post I saw by BBC World news. I responded with the following:
Ebola has a high kill rate. It burns out locally. This is yet another perfect example of a virus that is an exceedingly unlikely candidate in terms of global spread ("emergency"), and this is precisely because it is easy to recognize (short incubation period) symptom-wise, and to contain (active care brings CFR down markedly).
Ebola is not contagious until symptoms appear!!, and transmission requires direct contact with bodily fluids of symptomatic people or contaminated materials.
This - from a COVID 2.0 point of view - in my educated opinion - is another nothing burger. It is a baddie as viruses go (don't get me wrong), but not a pathogen likely to invoke "a global emergency".
If you ask me, this is another straw-grasping attempt to secure relevancy and funding by certain entities and organizations. Keep going. The night is darkest before the dawn. Fear not.
N.B. Tis the season of digital surveillance and tracking how many of corn are in our poo so no one could ever convince me that the powers that be don't know precisely the location and movement of every single person who might be Elola-ed. Hence, containment is easy and active care!!! with appropriate solutions (like supportive fluids) should be the go-to.
Background on the “outbreak” in Africa
The Ebola Bundibugyo virus (let’s call it Albundybug) outbreak is ongoing in Ituri Province, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Bundibugyo virus (Orthoebolavirus bundibugyoense), is one of the six known species in the Ebolavirus genus.
The virus is a single-stranded, negative-sense RNA virus with a genome of 18,940 nucleotides, and encodes 7 structural proteins: NP, VP35, VP40, GP, VP30, VP24, and L (RNA polymerase). It causes Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) (Albundybug disease).
It is the most recently discovered ebolavirus, first identified in 2007–2008 during a previous Uganda outbreak (Bundibugyo District) that had 131–149 cases, 37–42 deaths and thus a CFR of ~25–32%. This CFR lower than the CFR for Ebola Zaire or Sudan and historical data shows an overall pooled CFR of around 32–37% across outbreaks (meta-analyses report ~32.8%).12
Importantly, factors like access to supportive care influence outcomes when Ebola bears its head - like all viruses. No specific approved vaccines or therapeutics exist for Albundybug, so treatment does rely on optimized supportive care (fluids, symptom management, etc.).
Reports indicate dozens of deaths (ie: 65–80 suspected community (local) deaths) and hundreds of suspected cases, with spread to Uganda via an imported case. This is one of the larger Bundibugyo outbreaks to date, so naturally this has prompted WHO and Africa CDC “responses”, though it is very important to understand that global risk is low to nil. Read that again.
Symptoms
Symptoms are clinically indistinguishable from other Ebola diseases whereby the incubation period falls between 2–21 days, with an average of about week. This is important to understand because it means we can identify quickly if new people might be infected via visible symptoms. Symptoms include sudden onset fever, fatigue, headache, muscle pain and sore throat and can progress to vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, rash and impaired kidney/liver function. Bleeding is less common but possible in severe cases.
Bundibugyo virus (BDBV), like all other Ebola virus species that cause disease in humans, is not transmissible during the asymptomatic (incubation) phase.
The Albundybug is not airborne. It spreads via direct contact with blood, bodily fluids, or contaminated surfaces of symptomatic people or deceased individuals, so unless you’re in the clean up crew without PPE, you’re not likely to get it.
To be clear, human to human transmission occurs in healthcare settings, during caregiving, or unsafe burials without proper protection. Because we live in a world where we all leave a digital footprint a mile wide, early detection, contact tracing, infection control, and supportive care are exceedingly prevalent and will contain an outbreak if the goal is to do so.
Importantly, Albundybug is actually rarer than Zaire or Sudan viruses, with only a handful of known outbreaks before the current one.
I will do a deep dive into its sequence (if I can find reliable sequence data) and let you all know if there are any “suspicious changes” to its genome. Publicly available [full genome] sequences from this specific outbreak are not yet released.
The sequence widely used as a reference sequence in phylogenetic studies and variant analyses, such as comparing 2012 outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo to this 2007 Ugandan isolate, is Genbank accession number: FJ217161, so I will use this one when the new sequence is published.
Stay tuned.
Izudi J, Bajunirwe F. Case fatality rate for Ebola disease, 1976–2022: a meta-analysis of global data. J Infect Public Health. 2024;17(1):25-34. doi:10.1016/j.jiph.2023.10.020
https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/outbreaks/index.html
You have to admire the tenacity of the usual scumbags (WHO, CDC, BBC, CBC…) but they’re going to be outdone by Jessica and our other hardworking truth seekers. Thanks for laying this out so clearly and helping us see through their bullshit.
What if they gave a pandemic and nobody cared? Living on earth will eventually kill you and perhaps we should focus on living well rather than in fear.