Ebola Grew Deadlier During The Last Outbreak

Let a pathogen break out, and it will adapt:

The Ebola epidemic that tore through West Africa in 2014 claimed 11,310 lives, far more than any previous outbreak. A combination of factors contributed to its savagery, among them a mobile population, crumbling public health systems, official neglect and hazardous burial practices.

But new research suggests another impetus: The virus may have evolved a new weapon against its human hosts. In studies published on Thursday in the journal Cell, two teams of scientists report that a genetic mutation may have made Ebola more deadly by improving the virus’s ability to enter human cells.

The researchers do not yet understand exactly how it works, but several lines of evidence suggest it helped expand the scope of the epidemic. One alarming finding: Patients infected with the mutated version of Ebola were significantly more likely to die.

There is a compounding aspect to it. The more the pathogen breaks out, the more it adapts, and the more it adapts, the more it breaks out. The less it spreads into the population, the less it adapts, and the less it adapts, the less it spreads.

In a way, you can look at it as being on the knife’s edge. Humanity falls off one side, or falls off the other.

So why do pandemics happen sometimes, and not happen others? There is a lot that is random, but the variable that isn’t is the human machine. Populations made of well fed and strong humans will tend to fight the pathogens off. Pathogens that land in weakened, poorly fed populations will tend to go wild, and there the pathogens will adapt and spread more.

It is not impossible that this new Ebola is hiding right now, in the testicles of an African somewhere, suppressed by an immune system that has fought with it to a draw. Or maybe it even escaped back into a wild vector.

If it hits, and the money just isn’t there for the unified global response to contain it, it could sweep across the African continent, accruing adaptations, and preparing it to make the jump into the first world. If the first world is mildly malnourished, watch out.

It will be a bad day to be a rabbit.

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