There was
nothing unusual-looking about the passenger arriving at Heathrow from
Lagos. He was carrying one of the most deadly diseases known to mankind,
but it wasn’t noticed by overstretched Nigerian airport officials
before departure, nor by attendants on the flight, despite their special
training to watch out for feverish passengers.
Because
Ebola is a disease that has an incubation period of between two and 21
days, it’s more than likely that the final line of defence — immigration
staff at Heathrow — failed to notice anything untoward about him
either. It wasn’t as if he was so unsteady or unwell that he couldn’t
answer basic questions.
And
so he was waved through. Little did anyone realise that his initial
flu-like symptoms — fever, headache, achy limbs, sore throat — would
soon become something much, much worse.
Ebola,
a disease which is fatal in 90 per cent of cases and for which there is
no vaccine and no known cure, was now in Britain for the first time. It
would soon be spreading across the country, killing almost everyone it
touched.
Fortunately
this is an imaginary situation, but an Ebola epidemic is the nightmare
scenario which inspires Hollywood disaster movie writers and keeps
public health officials awake at night.
However,
there is now widespread alarm among experts that it could actually
happen, because the deadly disease has spread for the first time from
remote jungle villages to claim its first victim in Lagos, one of
Africa’s most sophisticated cities, with air links to major cities
worldwide, including London.
And
woe betide anyone who comes in close contact with an Ebola victim.
While the virus’s one virtue is that it isn’t as easily transmitted as,
say, an airborne influenza, it is highly contagious if you come near
enough to be infected by any sort of bodily fluid.
This means
not only contamination from vomiting and diarrhoea — the next stage
after the fever and headaches — but saliva from a kiss, sweat from a
mopped brow, or even, it is thought, a sneeze.
If
a sufferer is looked after by loved ones, only the most ruthless
sanitation regime will save them. If he or she seeks medical help, risks
could be even greater.
As
one British expert told me yesterday, if an Ebola victim was
misdiagnosed and ended up being admitted to a normal hospital ward, the
‘consequences would be disastrous’ as nurses and doctors unwittingly
passed the virus to other patients and colleagues.
The final
stages of the disease are hideously unpleasant as the virus punches
holes in veins, often causing massive internal haemorrhaging and
bleeding from the eyes, ears, mouth and other orifices. Death is
generally caused by multiple organ failure.
Just
as well, then, that no one ever gets Ebola beyond a handful of unlucky
souls in the remote rural villages of equatorial West and Central
Africa, where locals ignore warnings and still eat the fruit bats and
monkeys that are the chief carriers of the disease.
At least, that’s what public health experts have been saying for years. Suddenly, though, they are changing their tune.
The
latest outbreak of the disease is not only to be the worst ever by
number of deaths, it has also been the first to spread to people living
in major urban centres, including national capitals. The risk of it
spreading across the world is now very real, experts warn.
Since
the outbreak started in Guinea in February, spreading to Sierra Leone
and Liberia, the virus has infected more than 1,200 people, killing 672
of them so far.
A
cruel irony of Ebola is that those caring for its victims often
contract the disease themselves. Recent casualties included one of
Liberia’s most respected doctors and two Americans — thought to be
Ebola’s first Western victims.
Dr
Ken Brantly was the medical director of a Christian aid charity,
Samaritan’s Purse, who had been working in Liberia since October. He
contracted the disease despite wearing head-to-toe protective clothing
while treating sufferers.
Nancy
Writebol, a Christian missionary, had also been working with Ebola
victims in the Liberian capital of Monrovia when she became infected.
Dr Brantly,
at least, may yet defy Ebola’s grim statistics. Early treatment improves
a patient’s chances of survival, and he recognised his own symptoms and
got immediate care.
His
wife and two young children were with him in Liberia until flying home
to the U.S. a few weeks ago, but they have not yet shown any signs of
the disease.
On
Sunday, Liberia took the drastic step of closing its borders but it may
be already too late. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, a Liberian
man who tested positive for Ebola died on Friday.
Patrick
Sawyer, a civil servant, collapsed at Lagos Airport as he returned from
the funeral of his sister, who had also died from the disease. He
changed plane in Togo and was vomiting on board, prompting fears the
disease has already spread to a fifth country from just one outbreak.
Nigeria’s government says all ports of entry are on high alert.
‘The situation is getting more and more scary,’ conceded Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s assistant health minister.
Hugh
Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriorology at Aberdeen
University, warns: ‘If the disease gets going in Nigeria, it would be
cause for concern. Nigeria has close links with the UK and many other
countries.’
Professor
Pennington, an international expert, said yesterday that he was hardly
reassured by current efforts to contain Ebola’s spread.
‘This
is a very big outbreak, and I get the feeling that whatever is being
done to control it is not being done very well. Once you get a fairly
large number of cases, it gets a momentum and becomes more and more
difficult to control.
‘This is now crossing international borders.’
Professor
Pennington, who criticised the UK government over its handling of mad
cow disease, warned that Britain would be ill-equipped to cope with a
sudden influx of Ebola victims.
Isolating
them is critical, he said, but ordinary hospitals simply don’t have the
facilities or the necessary highly trained staff. The specialist
hospitals that dealt with such diseases have largely closed.
‘If
[Ebola] came into London, I honestly don’t know where they’d put the
patients,’ he said. ‘We could cope with one or two, but more than that?
Let’s hope we don’t have to.’
The
big problem with Ebola, he stressed, is diagnosing it. The disease
looks much like common flu until it’s too late. Even the rash that
sufferers get after about five days could be confused with other less
serious ailments.
‘Ebola
patients can often go under the radar, but if they ended up in
hospital, giving blood samples and coughing over everyone, it would be
potentially disastrous,’ he said.
He adds that it was crucial for British GPs and hospital doctors to start watching out for Ebola.
‘If
someone is coming in with flu-like symptoms, it’s crucial to ask them
where they’ve been — and whether they’ve been to Africa.’
Surprisingly,
scientists are still not clear exactly where Ebola comes from. The
first known outbreak was in 1976 in a remote village near the Ebola
river in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Although
most of the cases are understood to have been transmitted from human to
human, each Ebola outbreak is initially caused by someone coming into
contact with the blood or body fluids of an infected animal, such as a
fruit bat, monkey or pig. (The bats are believed to carry the disease
without being infected by it.)
The
chief cause is the popularity of ‘bush meat’ — animals trapped in the
wild. Bats and monkeys are frequently dried and then eaten without being
cooked. Since bush meat is now being smuggled into London and Paris,
scientists warn this could be another source of infection in Europe.
According
to Dr Ben Neuman, a virologist at Reading University, the disease is
spreading so rapidly now because people are ‘rescuing’ Ebola sufferers
from hospitals or snatching their dead bodies so they can wash them in
accordance with religious custom.
In
the first case of an infection in Sierra Leone, a hairdresser in
Freetown, the capital, was forcibly removed from hospital by her family,
sparking a frantic search to find her before she infected others. She
died on Sunday.
Dr Neuman also fears officials in the UK may be hard-pressed to keep out every Ebola sufferer if their numbers become too great.
‘We
have to hope they do, though, as in the late stages of infection, you
have enough virus in your body to infect everyone on Earth maybe three
times over.’
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