... And find the werewolf gene's lair.In November 1994, a 34-year-old zoologist studying a wild chimpanzee chimpanzee, an ape, genus Pan, of the equatorial forests of central and W Africa. The common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, lives N of the Congo River. Full-grown animals of this species are up to 5 ft (1. troop in West Africa's Tai National Park performed an autopsy on a chimp that had died of an unknown illness. Eight days later, the woman got sick herself. She was flown home to a Swiss hospital and eventually recovered. Now, a team of scientists has discovered the cause of this woman's sickness--a new strain of Ebola virus Ebola virus (ēbō`lə), a member of a family (Filovirus) of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers. The virus, named for the region in Congo (Kinshasa) where it was first identified in 1976, emerged from the rain forest, where it survives in . It joins three other strains of Ebola, including the lethal Zaire version that is currently fueling an epidemic of human illness in the city of Kikwit (SN: 5/27/95, p.333). The new Ivory Coast Ivory Coast: see Côte d'Ivoire. strain causes both fever and hemorrhage hemorrhage (hĕm`ərĭj), escape of blood from the circulation (arteries, veins, capillaries) to the internal or external tissues. The term is usually applied to a loss of blood that is copious enough to threaten health or life. in chimp and human victims. Reports of those symptoms alerted Bernard Le Guenno of the Pasteur Institute The Pasteur Institute (French: Institut Pasteur) is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, microorganisms, diseases and vaccines. in Paris and his colleagues to the possibility of infection with a type of Ebola virus. The researchers obtained samples of the woman's blood and flushed out a new strain of Ebola virus. "The new strain is lethal for chimpanzees and we may suppose for humans," the authors write in the May 20 Lancet. Ebola viruses are known as filoviruses for their long, filamentlike appearance under a microscope. "This is the first time that a human infection has been connected to naturally infected monkeys in Africa," say the authors. |
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