60 Fun Facts About Ebola

Ebola is named after a river in which present-day country?

Democratic Republic of the Congo: the virus surfaced in 1976 at the village of Yambuku, but the scientists who identified it named it after a river some distance away so the village would not carry the stigma.

Which animals are believed to be the natural host of ebolaviruses?

Fruit bats are the leading suspect, though the reservoir has never been confirmed; the other wild animals that pass the virus to people tend to die of it themselves.

Which antiviral, tested against Ebola in Congo in 2019, became the first drug the US approved to treat COVID-19?

Remdesivir was dropped from the Congo trial when two rival treatments saved more patients, then found its use a year later: in October 2020 it became the first COVID-19 treatment to win US approval.

The first victim of the 1976 Yambuku outbreak, a village headmaster, was at first treated for which disease?

Malaria was the natural guess for a fever in the tropics, and Ebola's first symptoms still mimic it so closely that only a laboratory test can tell the two apart.

What is Ebola's maximum incubation period, the standard monitoring window for contacts?

21 days is the accepted outer limit for symptoms to appear, so the WHO doubles it for safety: an outbreak is declared over only after 42 days with no new cases.

How does Ebola spread between people?

Direct contact with body fluids is needed, and only once a person has symptoms, which is why caregivers and those who prepare the dead for burial are hit hardest; airborne spread between people has never been documented.

Ebola virions are filamentous particles that may appear in the shape of what?

A shepherd's crook is one of the bends these long threads take, and the thread shape names the whole family: filovirus comes from the Latin filum, 'thread'.

Roughly how many genes does the Ebola virus carry?

7 genes are all it has, yet two of them are enough to jam the interferon signals an infected cell uses to call for help.

Ebolaviruses are most closely related to which other group of haemorrhagic fever viruses?

Marburgviruses are named after the German town where laboratory workers caught the first known cases from imported monkeys in 1967; the first Ebola samples of 1976 were at first mistaken for Marburg.

Which ebolavirus is considered the most dangerous and responsible for the most outbreaks?

Zaire virus is the deadliest of the six and has caused more outbreaks than any other, which is why the licensed vaccines and drugs all target it alone.

Which two ebolaviruses are thought to be harmless to people?

Reston and Bombali are the exceptions: people exposed to Reston virus have made antibodies to it without ever falling ill, and Bombali has not been shown to cause disease in anyone.

ZMapp, an experimental Ebola drug tested in Congo's 2018-19 trial, was manufactured inside which plants?

Tobacco plants in Kentucky greenhouses did the work: each was infected with a carrier virus bearing the drug's genes, then harvested so the medicine could be extracted and purified.

Which type of immune cell is among the first that Ebola virus infects?

Macrophages, scavenger cells meant to engulf invaders, are hijacked instead: once infected they carry the virus to the lymph nodes, where it multiplies before spreading through the body.

In which body fluid can Ebola virus persist for more than a year after a survivor recovers?

Semen can carry the virus long after blood tests come back clear, so the WHO offers male survivors monthly testing and advises safer sex until two results in a row are negative.

In May 2014 Ebola reached a third West African country through mourners at the burial of which local figure?

A traditional healer had treated sick patients who crossed the border seeking her care; she died of the virus, and the women who attended her burial became that country's first chain of cases.

Which farm animal can transmit Ebola to primates without contact, as the virus concentrates in its lungs?

Pigs infected in a 2012 experiment passed the virus to monkeys caged in the same room without ever touching them; when the same set-up was tried from monkey to monkey, it never spread.

Peter Piot, who helped identify the Ebola virus in 1976, went on to become the founding head of which global health body?

UNAIDS: the 1976 outbreak turned Piot towards the AIDS epidemic then emerging in Africa, and he went on to lead the UN's joint programme against it from its creation.

How did nuns at Yambuku's mission hospital unwittingly spread Ebola in 1976?

Reusing unsterilised needles for vitamin injections was the cause Peter Piot's team uncovered: each morning the clinic was issued just five syringes, used on patient after patient.

In 1976 the blood sample that revealed Ebola flew from Kinshasa to Europe on a commercial flight, packed in what?

A Thermos flask of melting ice held the vials, and one had broken on the way; the scientists who opened it wore only lab coats and gloves, unaware of what had leaked into the water.

The nuns who ran Yambuku's mission hospital when Ebola struck in 1976 came from which European country?

Belgium: Yambuku lay in what had been the Belgian Congo, so when word of the sisters' deaths reached home the government sent investigators, among them a 27-year-old volunteer named Peter Piot.

The 1976 Sudan outbreak began with a storekeeper at a factory in the town of Nzara that processed what?

Cotton workers at the Nzara factory began falling ill in late June 1976, two months before Yambuku's first case, yet health authorities learned of the outbreak only that September.

The reference strain of Ebola virus used in laboratories, 'Mayinga', is named after which victim of the 1976 outbreak?

A hospital nurse: Mayinga N'Seka caught the virus in Kinshasa while caring for a nun flown in from Yambuku, before anyone knew what precautions the new disease demanded.

Which island nation pledged 165 doctors and nurses to West Africa's Ebola zone in September 2014?

Cuba's team went for six months at a stretch, drawn from a state programme that has long posted the island's doctors and nurses to poorer countries.

In which country was a new ebolavirus species identified during a 2007 outbreak?

Uganda's Bundibugyo district gave the new virus its name, and in that first outbreak it proved milder than its cousins: fewer than half of those infected died, where earlier outbreaks had killed up to nine in ten.

How did a Russian laboratory worker catch a fatal case of Ebola in 2004?

A needle-stick injury: she was helping to develop an Ebola vaccine when she accidentally injected herself with the virus it was meant to stop.

The 2013-16 West African epidemic was traced to a toddler who died in December 2013 in which country?

Guinea's remote village of Meliandou, near the point where three countries meet, was the starting point; the virus then spread for more than three months before anyone identified it as Ebola.

Roughly how many people were infected in the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014 to 2016?

About 28,000 cases were reported, with more than 11,000 deaths; earlier outbreaks had burned out in remote villages, but this time the virus reached crowded capital cities.

Which 1980s charity single returned in 2014 for Ebola relief?

Do They Know It's Christmas? returned as Band Aid 30 after the United Nations asked Bob Geldof for help, with its lines about feeding the hungry rewritten for the new crisis.

In August 2014 the WHO said an 'unprecedented' number of which group had caught Ebola?

Health workers were short of protective gear and far too few for the caseload, and each doctor or nurse who died left the response weaker.

Whom did Time magazine name Person of the Year for 2014?

The Ebola fighters shared the title; one cover showed Salome Karwah, a Liberian who lost both parents to the virus, survived it herself and went back to her clinic to care for other patients.

Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the US, had flown to which state?

Texas: a Dallas hospital sent him home on his first visit; he returned days later and died on 8 October 2014, and two of the nurses who treated him caught the virus but recovered.

The first person-to-person spread of Ebola outside Africa infected a nurse in which country in 2014?

Spain: a nursing assistant in Madrid caught the virus from a missionary priest flown home for treatment; she recovered, and tracing of her contacts found no one else in the country infected.

British nurse Pauline Cafferkey was diagnosed with Ebola in 2014 after returning from which country?

Sierra Leone, where she had worked at a treatment centre; she was discharged as recovered, then fell critically ill nine months later when the virus was found still lingering in her body.

The New York doctor who tested Ebola-positive in October 2014 had been volunteering with which organisation?

Medecins Sans Frontieres had posted Craig Spencer to West Africa; the day before his fever began he rode the New York subway and went bowling, which set off a citywide effort to retrace his steps.

Which country was stripped of the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations after asking to postpone it over Ebola?

Morocco asked for a delay; African football's governing body refused, moved the tournament to another country two months before kick-off and expelled the Moroccan team from it.

The 2018-2020 Kivu Ebola epidemic was especially hard to contain because it struck what kind of setting?

A military conflict zone: armed groups fighting over the region's minerals attacked health facilities around Beni again and again, forcing vaccination and contact tracing to stop each time.

A July 2019 Ebola case in which city led the WHO to declare the Kivu outbreak a global emergency?

Goma is a city of almost two million on the Rwandan border, with an international airport; the patient had passed three health checkpoints under different names before he reached it.

A quarter of people surveyed in the 2018 Kivu outbreak zone believed Ebola was what?

Not real, a quarter of those surveyed said, and people who held that belief were less likely to accept a vaccine or to seek care at a clinic.

Which drug company makes Ervebo, the Ebola vaccine used in Congo since 2018?

Merck stepped in only in 2014, at the height of the West African epidemic, licensing the vaccine from a small biotech whose main business was cancer vaccines.

The 2015 trial that proved the Ebola vaccine used which strategy borrowed from smallpox eradication?

Ring vaccination means vaccinating everyone in contact with each new case, and their contacts, instead of a whole population; in the trial, nobody who got the vaccine fell ill from the tenth day on.

In which country did government scientists create the Ebola vaccine now sold as Ervebo?

Canada's national microbiology laboratory in Winnipeg had built it years earlier, yet when the West African epidemic began in 2014 it had still never been tested in people.

The vaccine Ervebo is a livestock virus engineered to carry which part of the Ebola virus?

Its surface protein is all the immune system needs to see: the carrier virus wears Ebola's coat spike in place of its own, so the body learns the target without ever meeting Ebola itself.

Ansuvimab, approved in December 2020 under the brand name Ebanga, is what kind of treatment?

A single monoclonal antibody, copied from the immune cells of someone who survived the 1995 Kikwit outbreak; in a 2019 trial about a third of patients given it died, against half on older drugs.

Which two common painkillers does the WHO warn against giving to Ebola patients?

Aspirin and ibuprofen can make bleeding worse, so the WHO's advice to families nursing a patient at home put it in capitals: do NOT give either.

How long does boiling take to destroy ebolaviruses?

Five minutes of boiling is enough, and a 0.5% bleach solution kills it as quickly in laboratory tests; left alone on a surface, though, the virus can survive for days.

At which biosafety level must Ebola virus be handled?

BSL-4 is the highest level there is; in 1976, before anyone knew what the virus was, the first samples were opened on an ordinary bench by scientists in lab coats and gloves.

Which 1994 Richard Preston bestseller told how an ebolavirus spread through a monkey house near Washington, DC?

The Hot Zone grew out of a 1992 New Yorker article, and the virus at its centre proved a paradox: it killed monkeys by the dozen but has never made a person ill.

The monkeys that carried an ebolavirus into a Virginia research facility in 1989 had been imported from which country?

The Philippines shipped the crab-eating macaques by air; once the virus was identified, a US Army team in protective suits entered the building and put down every remaining monkey.

Ebola is thought to have killed about 5,000 of which animals around one Congolese sanctuary?

Gorillas died group after group, each falling ill about one disease cycle after its neighbours, which told researchers the apes were passing the virus to one another.

In 1994 a scientist in Ivory Coast caught a new ebolavirus after carrying out an autopsy on which wild animal?

A chimpanzee from a troop that had been dying off in the Tai Forest; the scientist fell ill, was flown to Switzerland and recovered, the only person known to have caught that virus.

Which ebolavirus caused a 2022 East African outbreak with no vaccine available?

Sudan virus returned in September 2022; the vaccine stockpiled since West Africa's epidemic was built for a different ebolavirus, so the outbreak had to be ended by tracing and isolation alone, in under four months.

Which ebolavirus caused the epidemic declared in Ituri province in May 2026?

Bundibugyo virus had caused only two earlier outbreaks; with no approved vaccine or drug against it, the WHO declared an international emergency within days of the first confirmed cases.

Weeks after an American doctor's blood tested clear of Ebola in 2014, live virus was found still inside which organ?

His eye, nine weeks after his blood was clear: the inside of the eye is shielded from the immune system, which makes it one of the few places where the virus can hide after recovery.

Death from Ebola, when it occurs, is most often due to what?

Shock from fluid loss, after days of vomiting and diarrhoea, is the usual killer, not the bleeding the disease is famous for; heavy bleeding is in fact uncommon.

How many physicians did Liberia have for its whole population when Ebola struck in 2014?

About 50 doctors were all that years of civil war had left the country, one for every 70,000 people; its ambassador in Washington warned that Ebola had brought it close to collapse.

In July 2014 a traveller brought Ebola to which African city of 21 million, an outbreak that was stopped at 20 cases?

Lagos health teams traced every known contact in the city, and three months later the WHO called the result 'a spectacular success story'.

Whom did President Obama name as his 'Ebola czar' in October 2014?

Ron Klain was a lawyer, not a doctor: he had been chief of staff to two vice presidents, and in 2021 he became chief of staff to President Biden.

In July 2015, three new Liberian Ebola cases had all shared a meal of what, prompting an investigation?

Dog meat drew suspicion because the country had been declared free of Ebola nearly two months earlier and no patient was known who could have passed it on; tests on the dog's remains then found no virus.

Which Liberian president ordered the country's borders closed on 27 July 2014?

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf kept open only a few crossings, such as the main airport, each with a screening centre, and placed the worst-hit communities under quarantine.

Sheik Humarr Khan, who led his country's Ebola response until it killed him, was an expert on which disease?

Lassa fever: Khan ran the country's Lassa ward at Kenema, and when Ebola arrived that ward and its contact tracers became the country's first line of defence.