This week somebody came down with Marburg virus in Guinea. This is the first case since an outbreak in 2005, in Angola resulting in the death of some 200 people. This deadly virus was first observed in 1967, with simultaneous outbreaks in labs in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as Belgrade, Serbia. There ws no know treatment for the virus, and most who contracted it died.
Then in 1976 Ebola virus was discovered which was also untreatable, but minimally less deadly than Marburg. Since then there have been numerous small outbreaks of Ebola in Sub-Saharan Africa until the major pandemic of 2014-16 which also started in Guinea. There was a lot of fear about that event which ultimately died down on its own.
These two viruses are both deadly, but have minimal human to human transmission which requires an exchange of body fluids. Often these outbreaks were confined to families and funerals. Doctors without borders (Medecins sans frontiers) came to the forefront in fighting the 2014-16 outbreak in Africa. Their coverage of the pandemic brought the horror and difficulty of dealing with the disease to the world, where most people would never experience it.
Another recent pandemic of note (before our current SARS novel CoronaVirus-2 situation) was the first SARS pandemic of 2002-3. This mysterious coronavirus first appeared in Guangdong, China in November, 2002. Apparently it jumped from Civets to humans at a wild-foods market. But early 2003, businessmen has spread the disease across most continents. There was an explosion of scientific articles in the scientific journals (Emerging Infectious Disease, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and Nature among others). Isolating patients, masks and quarantines prevented the first SARS pandemic from spreading since unlike Marburg and Ebola this disease, like influenza was airborne and quickly spread from person to person.
A final resent infectious disease is MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome corona virus). This first appeared in 2012 in Saudi Arabia where it had jumped from camels to humans. In 2014 there were two cases treated in the U.S. Both were people who had traveled in the Middle East.
So, what about corona viruses? What are they? Where did they come from? The current hypothesis is they they originated in horses and were transmitted to humans over a thousand years ago. While most of these cause “the common cold,” easily transmitted from person to person, some have deadlier outcomes.
That brings us to the current SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic, which is better covered more fully another time.
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