Context

Guinea has declared an Ebola outbreak after three persons died in the country’s southeast. This is the first time the disease has been reported in the country since an outbreak ended in 2016

About

What is Ebola Virus Disease?

• Ebola is a deadly disease caused by a virus.
• Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is a rare but severe, often fatal illness in humans.
  • The term "hemorrhagic fever" means it causes bleeding inside and outside the body.
• The average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks.

Previous outbreaks The virus first appeared in two simultaneous outbreaks in 1976 in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The last major Ebola outbreak started in 2014, which emerged in Guinea and then moved across borders to Sierra Leone and Liberia. During the outbreak, more than 11,000 patients out of around 28,000 with detected Ebola cases lost their lives.

Transmission

• The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.
• The virus is not airborne, which means a person cannot get the disease simply by breathing the same air as an infected patient.
• Ebola jumps to humans from infected animals like chimpanzees, fruit bats and forest antelope.
• One of the natural reservoir of the Ebola virus is bushmeat – non-domesticated forest animals hunted for consumption.
• The disease spreads between humans through direct contact with infected blood, bodily fluids or organs.
• It can also spread indirectly through contact with contaminated environment.