Introduction
The Ebola virus disease (also known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever) is a potentially lethal infectious disease present mainly on the African continent. It is caused by the Ebolavirus, a genus of viruses that belong to the Filoviridae virus family. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) included it in its list of emerging diseases requiring the most attention in terms of R&D resources (WHO 2015). As of 2017, five different species of the virus have been discovered. These are the Zaire ebolavirus, the Sudan ebolavirus, the Tai Forest ebolavirus (previously called Côte d’Ivoire ebolavirus), the Bundibugyo ebolavirus, and the Reston ebolavirus. All five of them spread to nonhuman primates, but only the first four are known to infect humans.
History and Outbreaks
The first known cases of human infections with ebolaviruses appeared in 1976 in South Sudan and Zaire (presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]). Both outbreaks were caused by two different strains of the...
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Further Reading
Chowell, G., & Nishiura, H. (2014). Transmission dynamics and control of Ebola virus disease (EVD): A review. BMC Medicine, 12, 196. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-014-0196-0.
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Laurie, G. (1995). The coming plague: Newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance. New York: Penguin Group.
Wojda, T. R., Valenza, P. L., Cornejo, K., McGinley, T., Galwankar, S. C., Kelkar, D., Sharpe, R. P., Papadimos, T. J., & Stawicki, S. P. (2015). The Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015: From coordinated multilateral action to effective disease containment, vaccine development, and beyond. Journal of Global Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.4103/0974-777X.170495.
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Varga, G. (2019). Ebola. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_530-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_530-1
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