Ebola: I Am The Lord Terror Virus

I have decided to write a story. My name is Ebola. I will tell you who I am and how I got the name Ebola. This is my story and my advice to you especially Africans.

I am a virus. I live in the Viroverse what we viruses call out universe. For billions of years we lived in our universe going about our activities just as you humans do. Wars were fought, mighty viral armies squared off against each other for geopolitical dominance in the viroverse. In one of the great wars, I arose as one of the great warlords, a Lord Terror Virus.

I was feared in that world as I could shock and awe all. Our viral world the viroverse was discovered in 1876 by a Russian Botanist Dimitri Ivanovsky. Suddenly our world collided publicly with the world of man. Some of the members of the viral world were exposed by your scientists after Ivanovsky’s work. But I the lord terror virus remained hidden. How then did I get my name Ebola?

The year was 1976, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Wa Zabanga was the strongman ruler of Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo). I did not care much for him or for the affairs of men. I knew that he was corrupt and a stooge of the West.

I also knew that the West was active in using viruses as bio-weapons during the Cold War, our viral intelligence agencies had made that known to us. Then in that year, I do not know why or how, I decided to appear in humans. My first known recorded victim was Mabalo Lokela a headmaster in the village of Yambuku 60 miles south of the Ebola river.

Within days, I made him start having fevers and bleeding from all orifices. Finally I made the fatal viral blow and sent him to his ancestors. His wife, mother and close relatives who prepared his body for burial were also killed by me. The nuns, doctors and nurses who attended to them also suffered my revenge. I sent them to the other world. I had become a bio-terrorist.

Why did I chose this path? I do not know. Did powerful forces from lands where the sun sets send me on this destructive path? I still do not know. In all I reaped 318 victims and killed 280 of them on that apperance in Yambuku. Due to my proximity to the Ebola river, they gave me the name Ebola. Finally I had become a viral superstar bio-terrorist.

Not even Osama Bin Laden could match my chilling star power. When I infect people, I kill between 50% to 90% of my victims. This is how I wage war. I take no prisoners. That is my code of war. Other viruses have different codes of war. Mine is chilling. I am the lord terror virus.

How do I look like? I consider myself a very attractive virus. I am a particle that can appear in the shape of a shepherd’s crook or in the shape of a “U” or a number “6”. I know that some of you are terrified by the number 666, so I sometimes take that shape just to increase my macabre starpower. I am also coiled or have a toroid shape or branched like a tree. My height is between 974 to 1,086 nm. I am very conscious of my aesthetics.

I mostly dwell in fruitbats and monkeys. They are my natural habitat. Since you fear me, let me tell you the guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) about me.

• The suspected reservoirs for Ebola are fruit bats.
• Transmission to humans is thought to originate from infected bats or primates that have become infected by bats.
• Undercooked infected bat and primate (bush) meat transmits the virus to humans.
• Human to human transmission is only achieved by physical contact with a person who is acutely and gravely ill from the Ebola virus or their body fluids.
• Transmission among humans is almost exclusively among caregiver family members or health care workers tending to the very ill.
• The virus is easily killed by contact with soap, bleach, sunlight, or drying. A washing machine will kill the virus in clothing saturated with infected body fluids.
• A person can incubate the virus without symptoms for 2-21 days, the average being 5-8 days before becoming ill. THEY ARE NOT CONTAGIOUS until they are acutely ill.
• Only when ill does the viral load express itself first in the blood and then in other bodily fluids (to include vomit, feces, urine, breast milk, semen and sweat).
• If you are walking around you are not infectious to others.
• There are documented cases from Kikwit, DRC of an Ebola outbreak in a village that had the custom of children never touching an ill adult. Children living for days in small one room huts with parents who died from Ebola did not become infected.
• You cannot contract Ebola by handling money, buying local bread or swimming in a pool.
• There is no medical reason to stop flights, close borders, restrict travel or close embassies, businesses or schools.
• As always practice good hand washing techniques, but you will not contract Ebola if you do not touch a dying person.

I have struck a few times since that fateful first appearance in Yambuku near the Ebola river in the Congo. I am proud that I contributed to the overthrow of that dictator Mobutu since I showed that his healthcare system was incapable of dealing with me. I exposed his incompetence and accelerated his downfall which came later in the heady days of 1997. I danced on my viral legs for joy when that happened.

For a long time I took a holiday to take care of the affairs of my ancestors in the viroverse. I got bored of the long holiday and decided to strike again. This was after the end of the cold war. People had declared the end of history and the beginning of a new happy world. I laughed my viral heart out and roared not so fast, humankind. In 1994 I returned from vacation and went to the Ivory Coast and infected Chimpanzees who died in their numbers. But I spared humans. This was just a warning that I was back.

Then in 2007, I made a planned visit to Uganda where I reaped 116 victims and killed 39 people. After that they annnounced that the outbreank was over. I was mad that your African scientists and governments did not take me seriously and adopt preventive measures.

In fact in the year 1999 on BBC Health, a discovery was announced by a Nigerian scientist Dr Maurice Iwu, who set up and headed a Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme. He had found a set of compounds from Garcina Kola a plant commonly chewed in West Africa.

The compounds from the kola were very effective in laboratory tests against me the Ebola virus. He announced this at the 16’th International Congress of Botanists in St Louis Missouri, USA a country I long to visit. Dr Maurice said he was a son of traditional healers from Nigeria and was inspired by his parents. I the Ebola terror virus have been wondering why your African governments did not act on the initiative of the Nigerian scientist. If they had done so, I would have gone back to the viroverse almost for good.

But even for me the virus Ebola, I know that western pharmaceutical companies would not develop drugs for Ebola if they will not make money from it. How much more you Africans?

A few days ago, I heard from the news that American, European and Russian scientists are heading to Guinea to study and combat me Ebola when I struck this year in 2014 in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. What are you Africans doing?

Why are you not acting on the research of the Nigerian scientist Dr Iwu against me. Why are you sleeping? Recently I heard on a Ghanaian news website that some of your doctors at Korle Bu were saying that if an Ebola patient is brought to the hospital, they will runaway!

If you Africans do not wake up, I Ebola the lord terror virus will terrorize you ad infinitum. I want you to send me back to permanent retirement in the viroverse. I am trapped in your world for now. Please help me and send me back to the viral lands where the sun never sets and where in the molecular world I will find my everlasting abode and solitude in the beautiful songs of the viral maidens.