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West Africa is currently being assailed by the worst outbreak of Ebola virus ever recorded. As of 17th July, World Health Organisation (WHO) reports indicated that out of more than 1048 confirmed and suspected cases of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, 632 people had fallen victim to the deadly disease, and its rapid spread across the continent is creating serious concerns that the worst is yet to come.
 
The WHO report stated that the epidemic trend was “serious, with high numbers of new cases and deaths being reported” and health authorities are struggling to control the epidemic, though currently no travel or trade restrictions have been imposed on the affected areas.
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The problem is not only that many Africans don’t have enough to eat, it’s that they’re very fond of bush meat, which is the wild game of Africa. The problem is that this includes monkey meat, which is being illegally imported into the UK?and it often carries the lethal Ebola virus along with it. Last year, smuggled bush meat was implicated in 25,000 airport seizures in the UK, a 62% increase since 2004. Imagine the horror of an Ebola plague–in London! And if one started in London, it?s inevitable that, like SARS, it would eventually spread to this continent. This is more important than ever, since new research shows that one of the ways that HIV jumped from chimps to humans was through eating bush meat.
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The host for the devastating African disease Ebola, which has no cure and kills quickly and painfully, has not yet been found. The host is an animal which carries the virus but is not itself affected by it, and if it could be found, diseased creatures could be eradicated, ending the plague. Scientists haven’t yet found the host, but they have some potential candidates.

Shaoni Bhattacharya writes in New Scientist that researcher Townsend Peterson and his team are flying out to the Congo, where a new outbreak of Ebola is beginning, to continue the search. The latest outbreak has killed 11 people so far, and infected another 87. Another recent was in the same region and killed 128 of the 142 people infected.
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Scientists are studying African birds in an attempt to identify the mysterious source of the Ebola virus. In the Republic of Congo, where there was a recent outbreak, people probably got the disease from infected gorilla meat. But gorillas are also being killed by Ebola, so they’re not the source of the disease. “As long as we haven’t established the source of reservoir of the Ebola virus, it’s an illusion to think of an appropriate cure,” says William Karesh, of the U.S. Wildlife Conservation Society.
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