• Question: how would you describe ebola

    Asked by tom to Sian, Dawn, David, Dan, Christie on 15 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      A devastating disease which requires more research to understand and more development of treatments to manage.

    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Ebola is a deadly viral disease originating from Africa. It is a serious disease which has caused more than 11,000 deaths. But it’s unlikely that we would have an outbreak of Ebola in the UK, and we are lucky to have good infection control practises to prevent such outbreaks from happening.

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 19 Jun 2016:

      Ebla is a deadly virus that under the microscope looks like a long piece of spaghetti all coiled up! However, it is actually made of lots of tube-like structures that are joined together. Each of these tubes contains the virus’s genetic information. When it infects a person’s cells, it uses the cell’s machinery to replicate itself and its genome into millions of copies and also suppresses their immune system so that the virus won’t be attacked.

      The first symptoms are typically tiredness, fever, muscular and joint pain and headache. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhea and stomach aches, then chest pain and breathing problems, and then sometimes internal bleeding and possibly death.

      Similar to HIV, the virus first originated in animals, more specifically in bats. It spreads through bodily fluids such as blood or saliva. As Dawn said, we are still trying to find a vaccine.

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