February 22, 2000

AFRICA'S HEALTH CRISIS: A GLOBAL CONCERN
IN HIV'S SHADOW, MORE WORRISOME VIRUSES ARE LURKING

THE IVINDO RIVER, Gabon --
     The wind has no name. But it is a fierce wind, a bad wind, and when it blows down this tar black jungle river, most people run.  Because it turns their eyes the color of blood. Because the wind kills them.
     Isidore Edjimouagno knows. He survived the wind, though it left him a broken man. This is his claim to fame; He breathed the wind and lived. He is
a dead man, who sits blinking in surprise under the shade trees of his garden.
     “People thought it was yellow fever at first and weren't that frightened,” recalled Edjimouagno, 61, one of the scores of gold panners who were brought down the Ivindo River vomiting blood and semi-conscious. “But the next time the wind came they all ran away. The police had to set up roadblocks in the towns. They wanted to run all the way to the capital.”
     Edjimouagno's brush with the foul winds of the Ivindo River was actually the world's largest outbreak of Ebola.
     The virus has howled down the broad, silent river several times, most recently in 1997, swiftly killing at least 100 people, or about 8 of every 10 of its victims. As always, after burning through the local population it subsided back into the jungle.
     For all that scientists can decipher of Ebola's natural history, it might as well be a mystical wind....
     So it is ironic, then, that what gives the international community a case of the cold sweats isn't so much Africa's pandemics but the ambushes by new and emerging diseases that surface in the forests, pick up a few humans and disappear in the epidemiological equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
     Gruesome as the diseases are, global health authorities are more alarmed by the certainty that new Ebola-like scourges are on the way. Africa's growing population continues to push into tropical ecosystems, farming, cutting down trees and grazing cattle where they never were before. As it does, countless more humans will blunder into the ancient webs of parasitism between microbes and animals and thus become possible hosts themselves.....
     “Forget trying to stop these scary things spread out of Africa,” said David Heymann, the American executive director of the communicable disease program for the World Health Organization. “If you're sitting in Podunk, Wisconsin, you're not safe from these infectious diseases.  They go anywhere."

CHICAGO TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE