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Showing posts from 2014

Everything you need to know about Ebola

Right now, West African countries are experiencing the worst outbreak of Ebola in history. Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have confirmed more than 700 deaths from the disease, which has swept through those countries since appearing just six months ago. In this outbreak, it’s killing more than half of the people it infects — which makes it one of the less lethal strains of Ebola to emerge recently. Perversely, this relatively low mortality rate has a lot to do with its quick and devastating spread; Ebola is the sort of malicious evolutionary creation that exploits anything and everything it can find. It is the disease on which virtually all viral-horror thrillers are based. Remember that, much like HIV, Ebola is a new disease. The first recorded cases came in just 1976, in and around Zaire and Sudan. Ebola isn’t the sort of long-standing historical hardship that we can shrug off as part of the human experience, like cancer or the flu — this thing is younger than ma...