Do you like horrible stories? Do you enjoy fear? Then just read this remarkable Swedish paper from Claes Ramel, Professor Emeritus in the genetics of toxicology at Stockholm University, chair of the environmental committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and Arne Jernelöv, an environmental researcher and former head of the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), who is also a UN expert on environmental catastrophes and the environmental effects of war.

The viral diseases Aids, Ebola and SARS are unwelcome reminders of human vulnerability to epidemics. In the future there will be a greater probability that further viruses and other pathogenic organisms will succeed in making the leap from animals to humans. Improved global communications and mass movements of population are some of the causes, and presumably we would be wise to allow for new medical surprises ahead.
In most industrialised countries over the past two hundred years the average lifespan and state of health have constantly improved. The two most important causes appear to be improved hygiene and diet resulting from higher living standards. In the medical field it would seem that the single most significant advance is antibiotics. It has been possible to limit the devastating plague epidemics of earlier times to local outbreaks, and smallpox, the most feared of all epidemic diseases, has been eradicated.
Strains of bacteria remain, however, in military laboratories, and it is of course not impossible that they will again spread from there unintentionally or maliciously.

In modern times four other causes of death have come to dominate in the industrialised countries: cancer, heart attack, stroke and traffic accidents.
The relatively positive image of ever healthier people living longer lives is, however, not entirely unambiguous. Famine, poverty and high infant mortality are still realities in many developing countries, and the costs of antibiotics and other medicines are often pro-hibitive. The average lifespan is at times low. Socio-economic changes, as after the fall of the Soviet Union, have sometimes resulted in decade-long periods of increased ill-health and falling life expectancy even in industrialised countries.

Some medical surprises or, if one so wishes, unexpected futures – such as Ebola, AIDS and SARS – have also appeared.
All three are caused by viruses that are normally found in other species, but which in some way have succeeded in adding human beings to their hosts and have caught us unawares with their new ability to infect us.
EBOLA IS A RIVER in the Congo (previously Zaire) on which the first known outbreak in the western world of the viral infection Ebola occurred in 1976. The very high mortality, approximate-ly 90%, of the new disease caused concern and interest not merely in medical circles. Books like Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and films like “The Outbreak” with Dustin Hoffman contributed to the public image of a new curse.

Further Ebola outbreaks have since occurred in the Sudan in 1976 and 1979, Gabon in 1994 and 1996, Ivory Coast in 1994 and Zaire in 1996. The disease is a type of haemorrhagic fever with symptoms such as fever, fatigue, dizziness, muscle pain and exhaustion. Ebola infections lead to haemorrhaging of the skin and the internal organs, followed by renal failure and acute embolisms leading to death.

The disease is caused by an RNA virus of a type called filovirus. So far four strains of the virus have been identified.
The Zaire type has the highest mortality rate at 80-90%, whilst the Sudan form has a 50% survival rate. There is no remedy or any efficacious treatment.
Ebola is also contracted by chimpanzees and a number of other species. There has been speculation as to whether they might not be the disease’s natural hosts, but telling against this is the fact that the apes also have such a high death rate from the disease that it seems unlikely that the virus itself could survive and spread.
Similar viruses have been reported in birds and bats, and the latter seem today to be the prime suspects as Ebola’s natural host. The disease would then temporarily spread to apes and humans, but as a result of the high and rapid mortality from the disease in these hosts, the virus has not been able to establish itself in them.

Read the full article in the scientific Swedish magazine Framtidsstudier