Ebola

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it is good said it was the best paper on ebola she'd ever recevied

March 1, 1996 EBOLA Imagine going on vacation to a foreign country and

when youcome home y ou are horribly sick. Your head hurts, you have a highfever, and you start

vomiting. Chances are that you may havecontracted the Ebola virus. Ebola was first

discovered in the village of Yambuku(1) nearthe Ebola River in Zaire. Since its discove ry, there

have beenfour outbreaks of this disease. There are three known strains, ofvariations of ebola.

There is no known cure for this disease(2).Ebola has become one of the most mysterious and

feared viruses onthe face of this earth. Ebola's first documented appearance was in Zaire in

1976. Noone knows where ebola comes from or what the original host is.However, sc ientists know

that man is not ebola's natural host(3).The host was first suspected of being carried by monkeys

in theAfrican r ain forests(4), but in one case the monkeys at a holdingfacility broke out and had to

be killed.

In the pursuit of a cure and an origin, there have beenseveral teams of scientists

whose top priority is to find theviruses origin(5). The teams have trekked through the rainforests

of Africa to collecting different species of animals,bugs, and plant life. Bugs are also coll ected

from the hospitalsand from the surrounding huts of the villages. So far 36,000specimens have

been collected. Once they have been gathered, thespecimens are put into liquid nitrogen and

flown back to theUnited States, where they are studied at t he Centers for DiseaseControl in

Atlanta Georgia and the Army Medical Research Instituteof Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick

Md.,(6). Researchers havediscovered the source of human infection for all level fourorganisms

except ebola(7). This means that all organisns thatcause deadly viruses have been...