The Ebola Virus

In nineteen seventy six, a mysterious and deadly illness appeared almost simultaneously in the Sudan and Zaire. It killed with frightening speed, baffled doctors, and was eventually named after a river that few people had ever heard of, Ebola.

Since then it has caused some of the most feared outbreaks in modern history while also driving major advances in medicine, vaccines, and global public health. Learn more about the deadly Ebola virus and the efforts to fight it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fears the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals. Hey, the Great Awakening is a good thing.

Every We explore the fever dreams that some of the people are. Family and wellness guru. Down the right wing Colts. Trouble falling asleep, yearning for a new sleep ritual? It's time to unlock the magic of nightfalls. Step into a world where bedtime stories take on a whole new meaning. Night Falls is one of the world's leading bedtime story podcasts, transporting you to a mystical clearing nestled among ancient pines.

Hosted by the captivating Scottish voice of Jeffrey Newland, Night Falls offers original bedtime stories for adults delivered in friendly, soft tones. As each episode progresses, the pace slows down, gently guiding you into a deep slumber. Listeners say it always works and makes him sleep like a baby. So why wait? It's time to experience the tranquility of Night Falls for yourself. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts and embark on a journey to the mystical falls.

Just search Night Falls on your favorite podcast app and let Jeffrey's soothing voice guide you to a restful night's sleep.

The very word Ebola strikes terror into some people and for good reason. Ebola is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. And it isn't just that it has an incredibly high mortality rate, which it does, it's that the way victims die is horrific and painful. Technically, Ebola is not a single virus. It's a group of closely related viruses in the genus Ebola virus.

The one most people mean when they say Ebola is Zaire Ebola virus, the deadliest and most historically important member of the group. Ebola is rare compared with influenza or measles, but it has a reputation unlike almost any other virus. When it does break into human populations, it can kill a very high percentage of those that it infect.

Ebola viruses are categorized as phyloviruses from the Latin word for thread, because under an electron microscope they often appear as long filament like strands. Their natural reservoir remains unknown with complete certainty, but fruit bats are considered the leading suspect, and outbreaks often begin after some contact between wildlife and humans.

Once affected, Ebola does not spread like measles or influenza. It's not mainly an airborne respiratory virus. It spreads through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of someone who is sick or who has died from the disease. or through contaminated objects such as needles, bedding, or medical equipment. This is one reason Ebola can devastate families, health workers, and burial teams while still being much less contagious in public settings than other airborne viruses.

The incubation period of Ebola is usually between two and twenty one days. The Center for Disease Control describes the early illness as dry symptoms, including fever, aches, pains, and fatigue. As the disease progresses, it can move into wet symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, and unexplained bleeding. The bleeding is what made the older term Ebola hemorrhagic fever famous, but it's not always the most dominant symptom.

The real danger is often a combination of massive fluid loss, shock, organ dysfunction, immune system overreaction, and problems of blood clotting. Severe cases can include abdominal pain, rashes, red eyes, confusion, kidney and liver impairment, internal bleeding, as well as bleeding from the gums, nose, or injection sites. Ebola is highly lethal, but the exact lethality depends on the strain of Ebola, the outbreak, and the quality of care that someone gets.

The World Health Organization gives an average Ebola disease case fatality rate of around fifty percent, with past outbreaks ranging from about twenty-five percent all the way up to ninety percent. Ebola is one of the deadliest diseases in the world, but it's not the deadliest disease. On average, it has a higher mortality rate than things such as smallpox, but it's less than rabies, which has a one hundred percent fatality rate.

Rabi's, however, is preventable after exposure if it is treated in time. Compared with other viruses, Ebola sits in an unusual position. It's far deadlier than seasonal influenza, measles, or most coronavirus infections on a case-by-case basis, but it's much less efficient at spreading through the air. Measles is one of the most contagious human viruses and spreads through breathing, coughing, and sneezing, while Ebola normally requires contact with infectious fluids.

In terms of lethality, Ebola is closer to the Marburg virus, another phylovirus for which the World Health Organization reports an average fatality rate around 50%, and past outbreaks ranging from 24% to 88%.

We don't know when the Ebola virus first came into existence. It's probably existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, primarily being transmitted by animals. If there was transmission to humans, it probably occurred in isolated communities or individuals and swept through quickly given its high mortality rate.

The Ebola virus was first discovered in nineteen seventy six when two simultaneous outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever occurred in two neighboring locations, one in southern Sudan and one in northern Zaire. The virus was first isolated from a woman named Miriam Louise Erkan, a forty-two-year-old Belgian nursing sister working at the Yambuku Mission Hospital who died caring for people with the unknown disease.

When it came time to name the virus, the international team of scientists faced a deliberate choice. When the commission considered naming it the Yambuku virus, researchers Carl Johnson and Joel Bremen pointed out that naming the Lhasa virus after the Nigerian village where it was discovered had only brought stigma to the community. Johnson suggested naming the new virus after a nearby river instead.

There was briefly a push to name it after the Congo River, the deepest river in the world, but another virus with a similar name, the Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus already existed. So scientists looked at a map pinned on the wall and found a nearby river called Ebola. There's actually some irony in the name. The Belgian name for the river is Lebola, which is actually a corruption of the indigenous Ungbandi name Legbola, meaning white water or pure water.

Co discoverer doctor Peter Pio later acknowledged in his memoir that the map they used was inaccurate, and that the Ebola River was not actually the closest river to Yambuku, but by then the name had already stopped. There are five subtypes of the Ebola virus Zaire, Sudan, Bundi Bugio, Thai Forest, and Reston, each named after the location in which it was first identified.

The first three subtypes have all been associated with large outbreaks in Africa. The restin subtype is found in the western Pacific, and while highly dangerous to non-human primates, is not known to cause illness in humans.

The 1976 outbreak in Zaire was the first and set the template for the outbreaks that followed. The virus spread rapidly through the Yambuku Mission Hospital where unsterilized needles were reused, infecting staff and forcing the facility to close after multiple deaths. Many infected people fled to their home villages out of fear seeking treatment from traditional healers, which helped spread the disease further. That first outbreak resulted in 318 cases and 280 deaths.

In nineteen ninety five, an outbreak began among charcoal makers in the forest near the city of Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It led to three hundred fifteen cases and two hundred and fifty deaths. The virus spread through families and hospitals, but was eventually stopped when healthcare workers began using face mask gloves and gowns. In two thousand in Uganda there were four hundred and twenty five Ebola cases and two hundred twenty four deaths.

The outbreak began in Gulu and spread to other districts. The strain involved was the Sudan virus, and the median age of those infected was twenty-seven, though nearly fifteen percent of the cases were children under the age of five. The largest Ebola outbreak in history came between the years twenty thirteen and twenty sixteen. That outbreak in West Africa was the largest since the virus was first discovered in 1976, with more cases and more deaths than all previous outbreaks combined.

It started in Guinea and quickly spread to Sierra Leone and Liberia. By july twenty fourteen, it had reached the capital city of all three countries, and in August of twenty fourteen, the World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency of international concern. The disease ultimately spread to seven additional countries, including the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In total, there were 28,652 cases worldwide, with 11,325 reported deaths across 10 countries.

A second major DRC outbreak between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty was also significant, occurring in an active conflict zone and resulting in more than three thousand cases, making it the largest outbreak in that country's history. As recently as September 2025, the DRC Ministry of Public Health declared an Ebola outbreak in the remote Kasai province, which was contained by December 2025 with 53 confirmed cases and 45 deaths.

It was the sixteenth Ebola outbreak in the DRC since nineteen seventy six. The twenty twenty six Ebola outbreak is a fast moving outbreak caused by the Bundibu variant, centered in eastern DRC and now involving Uganda. As of the recording of this episode, the World Health Organization has reported over 800 suspected cases and over 800 suspected deaths.

So just how worried should you be about the Ebola virus? The short answer is not very. People should be concerned at a public health level, especially in the affected parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, but ordinary people in countries far from the outbreak should not be personally panicked. But for most people outside the outbreak region, the risk is very, very low.

And it might sound odd to say, but because Ebola is so deadly, the odds of it ever spreading like the Black Death are very remote. It simply kills those infected too quickly for it to spread rapidly. Likewise, because it has to be spread via fluids, it's relatively easy to protect against using modern medical precautions. One concern that has been expressed is the fear of Ebola becoming an airborne virus.

It is theoretically possible in the very broad sense that viruses can mutate, but extremely unlikely that Ebola would naturally become airborne in the way measles, chickenpox, or influenza can be airborne. For Ebola to become truly airborne, it would have to change a lot. It would need to replicate well in the upper respiratory tract, be shed in large amounts from the nose, throat, or lungs, survive in tiny suspended droplets, and still affect another person after being inhaled.

Those are not small tweaks to the virus. They would require a major change in the virus's biology, meaning the kind of cells and organs that it prefers to infect. And at that point it just wouldn't be Ebola anymore. There is actually some good news on the Ebola front. The twenty thirteen twenty sixteen epidemic was the largest Ebola outbreak to date, and it prompted numerous partners from the public and private sector to combine efforts and resources to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible.

The leading candidate was originally developed by experts at the Public Health Agency of Canada and later licensed to MERC. It uses a genetically engineered version of the vesicular stomatitis virus, an animal virus that primarily affects cattle, to carry an Ebola virus gene insert which trains the immune system to recognize Ebola. The vaccine underwent preclinical testing and then moved through phase one, two, and three clinical trials.

A key trial in Guinea in twenty fifteen used a ring vaccination strategy, vaccinating the immediate contacts of confirmed cases and the contacts of those contacts, and the results were striking. Of the people vaccinated immediately, there were zero cases of Ebola in the weeks following the vaccination. In November twenty nineteen, the European Commission granted a conditional marketing authorization for the vaccine, now sold under the brand named Ervibo.

The WHO prequalification followed within forty eight hours, the fastest vaccine prequalification process in WHO history. It was then approved in the United States in december twenty nineteen. Ervibo was tested in approximately sixteen thousand individuals across multiple clinical studies in Africa, Europe, and the United States before being approved.

Its limitations, however, are notable, as it specifically protects against the Xaire Ebola virus strain, which is the most dangerous, but does not protect against the others. Ebola is bad. There's no doubt about it. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Public health organizations certainly should be concerned about it. However, it isn't something that most people should worry about unless they live in Central or Western Africa.

The good news is that if progress on vaccines continue, maybe in the future, Ebola is something that no one anywhere will ever have to worry about again. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible.

And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.