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Ebola: Diseases
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Travellers usually do not venture to areas where Ebola is a risk. However any traveller to an area where disease is spread due to poor hygiene, should take care with storing unused food in rat proof containers and ensure that accommodation is free from rodents by maintaining a suitable level of hygiene. Travellers should ... contact their GP immediately at the first sign of fever on returning from a trip overseas.
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[W]hat is most remarkable about this latest hype is that by Africa's sad standards, Ebola is a pipsqueak. The current Ebola epidemic will probably fall short of the previous one in 1976, which killed several hundred people. Yet each year malaria kills an estimated one million Africans, tuberculosis kills three million, and other tropical diseases besides malaria kill as many as two million. There is probably no deadly disease in Africa that will kill fewer Africans this year than Ebola.
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In the early stages, Ebola may not be highly contagious. Contact with someone in early stages may not even transmit the disease. As the illness progresses, bodily fluids from diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding represent an extreme biohazard. Due to lack of proper equipment and hygienic practices, large scale epidemics occur mostly in poor, isolated areas without modern hospitals or well-educated medical staff. Many areas where the infectious reservoir exists have just these characteristics. In such environments, all that can be done is to immediately cease all needle-sharing or use without adequate sterilization procedures, to isolate patients, and to observe strict barrier nursing procedures with the use of a medical rated disposable face mask, gloves, goggles, and a gown at all times.
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A group of scientists, lead by Robert Swanepoel of South Africa's National Institute for Virology have been conducting tests on a variety of organisms from the region around Kikwit, where the last major outbreak of Ebola occured in April, 1995. The team has published its findings in the October-December Emerging Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control's online journal.
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The Ebola virus is spread by contact with body fluids, including sweat and saliva. Outbreaks of the disease are rare, and no one knows where the virus lives when it is not infecting humans. The disease usually kills its victims so fast that it ... destroys the host for the virus.
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Ebola is one of the most contagious and frightening diseases that exists today. It can kill its victim in as little as 48 hours. When it broke out in Northern Uganda, there were scant resources and little knowledge about how to deal with it at Lacor Hospital, in Gulu, Uganda. For nearly a month, medical staff treated Ebola patients without knowing what it was. Soon... it became clear that the nursing and medical staff were at risk from this haemorrhagic disease. In the end, thirteen nurses and the medical superintendent, Dr. Mathew Lukwiya, died from the disease.
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