I pray you are wrong. I suspect you may not be.
Zaire is the causative agent, but it appears that this is a new strain and it has evolved in parallel.
In March 2014, the World Health Organization was notified of an outbreak of a communicable disease characterized by fever, severe diarrhea, vomiting, and a high fatality rate in Guinea. Virologic investigation identified Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) as the causative agent. Full-length genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis showed that EBOV from Guinea forms a separate clade in relationship to the known EBOV strains from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon. Epidemiologic investigation linked the laboratory-confirmed cases with the presumed first fatality of the outbreak in December 2013. This study demonstrates the emergence of a new EBOV strain in Guinea.
...
Phylogenetic analysis of the full-length sequences established a separate clade for the Guinean EBOV strain in sister relationship with other known EBOV strains. This suggests that the EBOV strain from Guinea has evolved in parallel with the strains from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon from a recent ancestor and has not been introduced from the latter countries into Guinea.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1404505?query=featured_home&&&;
Meant to ping you to 84.
The problem with the analysis is how they are mixing the terminology. Using the terms ‘causative agent’ and ‘sister’ in the same analysis is very confusing.
The peg on which to hang ones hat here is that the Guinea strain is new. New species, same genus. If Guinea is a sister to Gabon and Congo, then its saying that Zaire was the parent to all three (same genus), but the sisters all went off to have their own families (new species).
Congo and Gabon bore Dad’s traits - fast incubation, fast infection, quick (relatively) death, fast burnout.
Not Guinea. This sister ‘evolved’ (crappy term to use in talking about what really is mutation) into having unfortunate characteristics:
1. It infects people (not all Ebola does).
2. It takes a while to incubate.
3. It is not confirmed as to when a patient can communicate the disease.
4. It is not confirmed as to how it is communicated.
5. It is not confirmed as to how long the virus can remain viably active on a surface or in the presence of sunlight (UV).
What would be a big break is if we found out that being infected with some other virus could make you immune to Ebola Guinea. Being sick with cowpox made you immune to smallpox, for example.
This is why all the ‘family tree’ stuff matters. I don’t buy that Zaire is the ‘causative agent’. I buy that Ebola Guinea mutated off of Zaire in parallel to Gabon and Congo, who also mutated off of Zaire, and that Guinea, unfortunately (yes, its probability we are playing with here) has all of these unfortunate properties.
Two interesting questions occur to me:
1. Can an animal, like a monkey, contract Guinea? If so, and the animal is able to survive it, can we learn something from it?
2. What your supplied analysis confirms is that Zaire is precisely what this new bug IS NOT. As such, can you be infected with a related virus that is less problematic and become immune to Guinea?
Presuming (the word they used) that Guinea mutated from Zaire may allow it to determine what changed genetically to make this species of Ebola so much more dangerous than Zaire.
Zaire is bad. The worst. But it killed quickly, so you could ‘starve’ it off - quit supplying it with fresh human hosts to transmit the disease. (Reston was the worst, worse than Zaire, but only infected monkeys)
This one is so much more insidious.
Bottom line: Zaire may or may not be the father. Gabon and Congo are apparently sister species, but Guinea’s properties indicate they bear many of Zaire’s properties, but empirically not all of them. In the mean time, between catching it and dying from it, you are vectoring it for some unknown period of time in an unknown way (fluids, aerosol, parasites). I love how people in the press make a distinction between ‘body fluids’ - human waste, sputum, blood, puss, semen, etc. Then they talk about ‘aerosol’ like the fluids in your breath aren’t really body fluids, even though the fluids present in your breath only just recently resulted from the interaction between the air in your lungs and the blood that arrived in the lungs for the oxygenization.
So far, nobody in the press is talking about this virus in a way that any medical person would break down its characteristics comprehensively to other medical people or policy makers. It feels like the press is doing as much speculating as any of us are. That leads the pundits to ASSUME things about Guinea that are not in evidence, like Guinea transmits like Zaire. The anecdotal reports seem to contradict that assertion.
It leaves us all to speculate even more, which accelerates the ‘panic’ problem. Zaire doesn’t incubate like Guinea, and if that’s true, than how else is Guinea unlike Zaire?
See the issue? Against the backdrop of the clown car we call the 44th Presidential Administration of the USA, you then reasonably assume they are lying their asses off.
Not what you want when Drudge has a new headline twice a day talking about all these people presenting classic symptomology, but somehow they are all testing negative.
When push comes to shove, they won’t have the moral authority to get people to do the right thing, even when they are right about what they are asking people to do.