Ebola virus disease

Severe haemorrhagic fever similar to Marburg disease. Caused by a filovirus, it spreads through contact with bodily fluids and has an incubation period of about 21 days. It is fatal in up to 90% of cases. There is no known cure, although a vaccine proved successful in animal trials in 1998.

The virus was first identified in 1976 when it broke out in the Ebola River region in the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). It usually affects monkeys, but in 1995 there was an outbreak in the human population of Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo, only 200 km/125 mi from the capital Kinshasa. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak officially over in August 1995; 244 of the 315 people who had contracted the virus had died. Further outbreaks were reported in several African countries, including Gabon (February 1996) and Uganda (September 2000 and November 2007).

As of February 2008, the World Health Organization said that 1,850 cases of the disease had been reported since its discovery, causing more than 1,200 deaths.