
Is Ebola Evolving into a Deadlier Virus? - pseudolus
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/is-ebola-evolving-into-a-more-deadly-virus
======
faitswulff
Tangential, but if a virus's contagion is regulated by its virulence (that is,
very deadly viruses are less contagious because they kill their hosts) does
that mean widespread access to modern medicine could remove the upper bound on
virulence by keeping the hosts alive?

I could probably formulate this question better, but the basic question is,
"could virus's symptoms be getting worse in general?"

~~~
cm2187
Not an epidemiologist, but I understand it mostly has to do with the means by
which the virus is transmitted. Ebola is very lethal but requires physical
contact of bodily fluids for transmission, which contains a lot its spreading.
You can probably sit on a plane next to a contaminated person and you will be
fine. That contains a lot the contagion vs a virus like the flu.

~~~
LgWoodenBadger
Transmissibility depends on strain, based on the book Hot Zone. Ebola Zaire
was transmitted only through fluids, while Ebola Reston was airborne.

Though maybe the differences are by-products of the poor models mentioned in
another comment.

~~~
Fomite
Hot Zone is...not a good book.

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davidhyde
> Ebola virus is a microscopic parasite that replicates inside the cells of a
> host

A lot of the terminology used in this article is confusing. My understanding
is that you get viruses (dead and tiny), bacteria (alive but small) and
parasites (alive and usually bigger than bacteria). The author also talks
about particles a lot as if the Ebola virus was only the rna and the particle
was its trogan horse. I thought that a virus was the whole thing.

The summary was as follows: Once the Ebola virus jumps from bats to humans it
mutates differently to what it would in bats. This can’t be studied because we
can’t experiment on humans so the scary thing is that we have to just wait and
see when there is an outbreak and every outbreak is different.

~~~
vibrio
To be honest we probably can't do quality experiments on bats either. That
explains why the article describes transplanting portions of the viral coat
proteins on to other viruses-- to enable growth, albeit in an artificial
system. that's how things are done. The problem of limited model systems is
only relevant to ebola, but many other viruses (bacteria, diseases, ....)

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Nasrudith
Really if Ebola is to be more deadly in absolute terms it ironically should be
far less lethal and disturbing in symptoms. If it was weakened to be say about
as bad as the flu in terms of lethality its kill count would be way higher.

Ebola is so lethal it would practically have to cause the deceased to
autocremate and destroy the remains to be any worse at spreading.

Killing your host quickly is a bad for a parasite - parasiteoids are the
closest to being viable in that model where their purpose is "use the host to
have your offspring instead of yourself".

~~~
chiefalchemist
> "Killing your host quickly is a bad for a parasite"

Exactly. If the virus mutates such that the time before symptoms appear gets
longer that's bad for the rest of us. But if it's the opposite (i.e., it kills
faster), then that's good news and it will - in theory - eventually burn
itself out.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Humans aren't the primary host so exceptional virulence isn't necessarily
contained by evolutionary pressure.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Perhaps. But humans are the species most likely to jump on a plane and take it
directly to some other major metropolitan area somewhere else in the world.

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taneq
I thought (ironically) that Ebola would evolve into a _less_ deadly virus,
because that would improve its contagion rates. It doesn't care if it kills us
(in fact it'd probably rather not). For a virus, the perfect balance is making
is making us as sick as possible (ie. using as much of our resources as
possible) without actually staying home from work.

~~~
Fomite
This only matters if Ebola's primary selective pressure is from human hosts.
If not, it doesn't matter. There are _plenty_ of viruses that will kill a
secondary host dead, but live swimmingly well in their primary host.

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etiam
I'm tempted to flag this for sensationalist, overly dumbed down presentation
of ordinary biology of viruses, but okay evidently some people found it
valuable.

As I remember it, the author's novel "The Hot Zone" (1994) was better writing
and far better science around Ebola and other filoviruses.

~~~
onychomys
Better writing, maybe, but the actual science in that book was a little
sketchy.

[https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-hot-zone-created-the-
worst-m...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-hot-zone-created-the-worst-myths-
about-ebola-1649384576)

~~~
etiam
Could well be. It's been a couple of decades since I read it, and a fair bit
of education in between. Not sure if that's an argument for or against
rereading.

But what Tara C. Smith presents in that Gizmodo post is hardly devastating
criticism. As she notes, Preston recognized that it was a a dramatized
description of the symptoms, and I don't see that it's "utterly wrong" for a
bad case, though I'm sure it's frustrating as an epidemiology professor to
repeatedly have people believe it's the only case.

As I recall it the Reston strain is never described as definitely airborne,
and an airborne Zaire strain is never mentioned except as a horrifying
possibility if one should acquire the ability (not entirely out of character
in a fictional thriller one might think).

The criticism for some sort of feminism-deficiency I don't give much for even
today, but it seems particularly unfair against a novel which was written
decades before today's charged ideological climate on that matter, and I
disagree that poor work-life balance and dysfunctional relationships is
particularly unrealistic when it comes to career scientists.

Remains then relatively low infectivity, but I think Preston might be forgiven
for not _emphasizing_ that in work of fiction built around the fear of Ebola
infection.

Thanks for the remark anyway, because it bears noting that the novel should
still not be taken to be a biology textbook.

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achenatx
The more people infected the more mutations will occur.

Mutations that delay death, make the virus lighter (more easily aerosolized),
or kill a smaller percent of the infected (letting some people be infectious
or even asymptomatic), might make the virus less deadly for individuals, but
more deadly overall.

All the mutations are happening simultaneously in a population. Ones that
cause the virus to spread better will be conserved precisely because those
viruses spread better.

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univalent
Articles like this make me think of this Family Guy joke:
[https://twitter.com/familyguytweets/status/20357781932908134...](https://twitter.com/familyguytweets/status/203577819329081344?lang=en)

~~~
twinkletwinkle_
It's a pretty well recognized phenomenon:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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crimsonalucard
>In biology, there is almost no such thing as proof.

In all of science as we know it, there is no such thing as proof. Proof is the
domain of mathematics and logic.

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thedudeabides5
Has anyone found a site with good data on the Ebola outbreak? I’ve tried to
track down, but the only stuff I’ve seen (from the WHO etc) needs a lot of
cleaning and like ends in 2015.

~~~
Fomite
One for the West African outbreak:
[https://github.com/cmrivers/ebola](https://github.com/cmrivers/ebola)

Note this ends in 2015 because that one and the current one are different
outbreaks.

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throwaway3627
This is concerning. It's also concerning when the country you live in contains
as many idiotic conspiracy theories shared hundreds of thousands of times just
like the DRC.

~~~
LandR
Anti-vaxxers?

~~~
cm2187
I suspect it has more to do with anti-westerners.

~~~
dfeojm-zlib
I wouldn't read it as a false-dichotomy us/them conclusion, but to the literal
facts: Philipines, DRC, US, many countries in Europe are becoming
hyperpolarized.. with the intent and aggression being laid down, the only
difference is the scale and nakedness of violent acts that result. It's
definitely social warfare that's being promulgated with aid of the internet by
charlatans and crazies alike.

~~~
cm2187
That's one thing but there is also a strong anti-french and anti-british
spirit in central africa which isn't new (was the case in the 90s already),
and I think this hostility must be much of the source of the defiance toward
foreign (ie usually white) health organisations.

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kazinator
What would make Ebola much more dangerous would be evolving a longer
incubation period during which infected people show no symptoms.

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TheRealPomax
Can someone post the one word tl;dr to help others decide whether this article
is worth reading or not?

I'm getting tired of these clickbait questions: has ebola's virulence and
efficacy increased, or not? Because if it has, that title should be "Ebola is
evolving into a deadlier virus", and that's entirely worth clicking through
for.

But if it hasn't, this is just clickbait and there are many, many more
articles getting published on the web that also require time to read, without
wasting time on this one.

~~~
nostrademons
tl;dr: Viruses mutate to become more contagious. There's some circumstantial
evidence this may have happened in the 2013/2014 West African Ebola outbreak.
The Kivu outbreak has ~600 hosts in which the virus is mutating _right now_.
The article doesn't address lethality at all.

(IMHO, all of the useful information in the article is in the first sentence
of the tl;dr.)

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coldcode
Wait until it gets into the US in a marginal part of society. Given we have no
universal health care, it's likely to spread and evolve faster than we can
stop it. The person in Dallas could have infected the homeless person in the
same ambulance who subsequently wandered off. Imagine an illegal person
catching it and fearing discovery tries to avoid a hospital, only to infect
those they are sharing a tiny room with.

~~~
tick_tock_tick
We didn't have universal healthcare when we stamped out polio, smallpox, or
yellow fever. I don't know why you'd think it would stop us now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diseases_eliminated_fr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diseases_eliminated_from_the_United_States)

~~~
phs318u
Because at that time people didn’t distrust medical authorities like they do
now (anti-vaxxers among others), and didn’t fear (as much) the other
consequences of coming into contact with government agencies
(incarceration/deportation).

~~~
5040
>Because at that time people didn’t distrust medical authorities like they do
now (anti-vaxxers among others)

I recommend taking a look at 'The State as an Immoral Factor' by Maria Louise
Ramé--pseudonymously written in the late 1800's. Distrusting medical
authorities is not a new phenomenon. Here's a small excerpt:

 _A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence to
be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said, a scratch
from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much more truly
dangerous than a dog 's tooth. Yet in the last five years the physiologists
and the state, which in all countries protects them, have succeeded in so
inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that even the accidental
touch of a puppy's lips or the kindly lick of his tongue throws thousands of
people into an insanity of fear. Dr Bell has justly said: 'Pasteur does not
cure rabies; he creates it' In like manner the state does not cure either
folly or fear: it creates both._

~~~
ziddoap
Maybe not new, but seemingly accelerating in magnitude.

>A 2015 Pew study [...] We as a country have less faith in the medical system
than we once did — trust was at 80 percent in 1973, and in 2016 it is 39
percent."[1]

[1][https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-dont-trust-
th...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-dont-trust-their-
institutions-anymore/)

