Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed a chimp. There, I found traumatized people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return. It took a day by canoe and then many hours down degraded forest logging roads passing Baka villages and a small gold mine to reach the village. I traveled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity “hot spots” like tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest. Mostly they shrug them off.īut in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. From Ensia (find the original story here) reprinted with permission.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |