Twenty-one days: the maximum incubation period for Ebola Virus Disease. That means if you have come into contact with the virus but have no symptoms by day twenty two, then you are clear.

Forty two days: the incubation period x 2, and the period it takes for a country to be officially considered clear of the disease. If no new suspected cases are reported for 42 days, the outbreak is over.

Today, Wednesday 13th August 2014, is a big day for me ... it has been twenty-one days since I left Liberia, and for the first time I know beyond a doubt that I am Ebola-free. Not everyone is so lucky. In my first 14 days of incubation in the comfort of my Southampton home, the number of cases in Liberia more than doubled from 249 on 23rd July to 554 on 6th August. Of these cases, 294 people had died. The country is in a state of emergency, schools are closed, roads are blocked, communities are quarantined and attempts to bring the disease under control are being crippled by widespread fear.

So for another 21 days I am going to write a blog post every day to raise awareness of the grim challenge confronting Liberians, and to raise funds to support the Red Cross, who I work with collaboratively in my normal life as a PhD social researcher, and who are at the front line fighting the worst known Ebola outbreak in history.

Wednesday 27 August 2014

Beauty and the beast

It was with slight guilt that when I first saw a picture of the Ebola virus under a microscope that I thought, “It’s quite pretty!”  The viruses Ebola and Marburg together make up the family Filoviridae, taken from the Latin "filum", meaning thread-like, based on their string-like structure.  The colourful illumination they use to display it makes the virus appear deceptively attractive – the reality is quite the opposite.  It is not just the high death rate that makes people afraid of Ebola – it’s what it does to you in the mean time.


Ebola Virus Disease used to be known as Ebola Haemorrhagic Fever.  Haemor-what, I ask?  This basically means it is one of a group of diseases characterised by fever accompanied by haemorrhage – that is, escape of blood from spontaneously ruptured blood vessels.  Lassa Fever and Yellow Fever also fall into this category, and are among the range of infectious diseases that Ebola may be easily mistaken for.  Here’s how it goes.

The first stage seems mundane – sufferers experience flu-like symptoms such as a sudden fever, profound weakness, muscle pain, headaches and a sore throat.

After 4-7 days, the symptoms develop, and a patient may experience vomiting, diarrhoea, low blood pressure and anaemia.  You can’t see it yet, but these are clues that the bleeding has started.

Not everyone will make it as far as the final, most gruesome stage.  Some recover, some die before the bleeding becomes evident beyond some bruising or bleeding from the gums.  After 7-10 days, Ebola has been causing blood vessels to rupture and has prevented coagulation (clotting), so that there is internal and external bleeding.  People bleed from the eyes, ears and nose.  They may vomit, cough up or excrete blood.  Bleeding under the skin causes a rash all over the body (similar to the non-blanching rash shown in severe meningitis).  The kidneys are often the first to give up.  In the end, at this stage, the bleeding and infection cause low blood pressure leading to multi-organ failure.  That is what will bring their suffering to an end.


For better or worse, the disease usually takes about two weeks to run its course.  Not so pretty now.

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