While the Ebola virus is spreading globally, its impact will mostly felt in the world’s poorer regions, especially Africa and the Asian subcontinent.
Rob Prince
Of the many strands that, woven together, make up one of the world’s greatest rivers, the Congo, there is one which enters the river’s main waters as the great river arches to its most northern latitude. Starting from the southeast regions of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it first stretches almost due north, its main artery referred to as the Lualaba. A ways beyond Kisangani and Bumba, the main branch, fed by hundreds of tributaries, lurches almost due west, making a gentle west-north-west arch until, past the rapids just after Kinshasa, it tumbles dramatically to the ocean past Goma.
Near the northern most point of the Congo’s flow, a tributary merges in from the north just west of Lisala, the Mongala, a river that flows essentially longitudinally from north to south. Near the head waters of the Mongala, the Ebola, “a tributary of the tributary,” itself a 155 mile river, flows into the Mongala from the northeast adding to its volume and energy. At the point where the Mongala enters the Congo mainstream, the great river is flowing almost due west from the continent’s interior.
The Ebola River gave its name to viral disease which has now reach epidemic proportions in West Africa having, by official statistics already taken the lives of 5,000 people. As statistical analysis in Sub-Sahara Africa is far from precise, it is possible that the actual number of victims is quite higher and that frankly, there is no accurate estimate of how widely the disease has managed to extend its range. According to Pierre Piot, the Flemish (Dutch speaking Belgian) researcher who, in 1976 first identified the disease as a unique new pathogen, it is quite different from Marburg’s Virus with which it was first confused.
In an October 4, 2014 interview in The Guardian of London, (a translation of an article which first appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel) Piot goes on to explain that the Ebola Virus actually did not originate along the Ebola River but among the Yambuku somewhat south of the Ebola River. Piot was working in a Belgian research lab at the time. When first handling the Ebola Virus he noted in The Guardian interview that “Of course it was clear to us that we were dealing with one of the deadliest infectious diseases the world had ever seen — and we had no idea that it was transmitted via bodily fluids!”