The mystery remains. The stakes are high.

July 18, 2015 9:30 AM

Seeking the Source of Ebola by David Quammen, photographs by Pete Muller [National Geographic] The latest Ebola crisis may yield clues about where it hides between outbreaks.

No one imagined that this child’s death, after just a few days’ suffering, would be only the first of many thousands. His name was Emile Ouamouno. His symptoms were stark—intense fever, black stool, vomiting—but those could have been signs of other diseases, including malaria. Sad to say, children die of unidentified fevers and diarrheal ailments all too frequently in African villages. But soon the boy’s sister was dead too, and then his mother, his grandmother, a village midwife, and a nurse. The contagion spread through Méliandou to other villages of southern Guinea. This was almost three months before the word “Ebola” began to flicker luridly in email traffic between Guinea and the wider world.

Related:

- How Ebola Found Fertile Ground in ​Sierra Leone's Chaotic Capital. [Part 1 of 4] [National Geographic]
- How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture’s Traditions. [Part 2 of 4] [National Geographic]
- Finding Homes for Ebola's Orphans. [National Geographic]
- Photographer Returns From Ebola Zone With Searing Images, Memories. [National Geographic]
- Photographer's Portraits of Liberia's Ebola Survivors Show Sorrow, Anguish—and Joy. [National Geographic]
- Inside an Ebola Clinic in West Africa. [National Geographic] [Video]
- Ebola casts a shadow over maternal health in Sierra Leone. [The Guardian]
- Ebola: Your Questions Answered. [BBC News]

posted by Fizz (5 comments total)

I highly recommend Quammen's book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. I mean, if you like being scared out of your mind. It was released prior to this most recent outbreak of Ebola, though the Ebola portions were updated and released as a smaller book as well. He's a fantastic writer and is very good at breaking down ideas and concepts.
posted by skycrashesdown at 9:42 AM on July 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

This interview with David Quammen over at Wired.com is also a great read.
posted by Fizz at 12:34 PM on July 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love this bit from the wired.com article:

I am very, very old-fashioned and clumsy. I use those long reporter notebooks. This is what a troglodyte I am. The night before I go off on a trip, I take a scissors, I pull out about four of these things and I cut off the bottom inch and a half so this thing is only that long. You know why? Because it fits in a ziplock bag if I do that.

I do a lot of work from jungles, from tropical forests – and my sine qua non field equipment are a ballpoint pen and a chopped-off reporter’s notebook in a ziplock bag. If everything else is gone, if we are swimming across a black lake for our lives, or we are falling down a hillside in the mud, or whatever, I still have my ziplock bag with that one notebook and that ballpoint pen in there.

I know that a trip has been successful at the ten-day or the two- week or the three-week point traveling in Africa or whatever, I reach a point where my notebooks are more valuable to me than my passport. That’s the ideal point. And if you get near the end and you’re still a little bit more concerned about your passport than about your notebooks, it hasn’t been a very good trip….

posted by Fizz at 1:31 PM on July 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

Thanks. I'm a huge fan of Quammen and had missed this.
posted by cedar at 9:39 PM on July 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

That main link is a fascinating story. It amazes me that after the recent epidemic that research into the host is not being funded. That resources can be burned up by medivacing infected persons out at vast expense during an epidemic but cant be found to fund research into finding the host(s) seems very short term thinking.
posted by adamvasco at 8:22 AM on July 19, 2015 [3 favorites]