To help provide a better understanding of the dreaded Ebola virus which claimed its first victim in Nigeria last week, the U.S. State Department, in consultation with medical specialists at the Embassy, with guidelines from the centre for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation, WHO, issued an EBOLA ALERT to allay people’s fears.
• The suspected reservoirs for all carriers of Ebola are fruit bats.
• Transmission of Ebola virus to humans is thought to originate from infected bats or primates that have become infected by bats.
• Undercooked infected bat and primate (bush) meat transmits the virus to humans.
• Human to human transmission of Ebola virus is only achieved by physical contact with a person who is acutely and gravely ill from the Ebola virus or their body fluids.
• Transmission among humans is almost exclusively among caregiver family members or health care workers tending to the very ill.
• The virus is easily killed by contact with soap, bleach, sunlight, or drying. A washing machine will kill the virus in clothing saturated with infected body fluids.
• A person can incubate the virus without symptoms for 2-21 days, the average being 5-8 days before becoming ill. Carriers of Ebola virus ARE NOT CONTAGIOUS until they are acutely ill.
• Only when ill does the viral load express itself first in the blood and then in other bodily fluids (to include vomit, feces, urine, breast milk, semen and sweat).
• If you are walking around you are not infectious to others.
• There are documented cases from Kikwit, DRC of an Ebola outbreak in a village that had the custom of children never touching an ill adult, children living for days in small one room huts with parents who died from Ebola did not become infected.
• You cannot contract Ebola virus by handling money, buying local bread or swimming in a pool.
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