An Ebola NIGHTMARE, The Mincher Scenario

[Dr Kevin J Woolley]

>
>but the fact is we do not know what the reservoir is, and we do know that it can
>be transmitted across species, so can we rule out that the reservoir can be
>increased by human to reservoir transmition.  
>
>And the fact that the virus has moved outside of its original eco system ,
>means that it definately has a chance to settle into the new one, and possible
>become a long term problem. And the fact that people are not being kept in
>level four quarantine makes it possible that the virus could establish its self
>in a non human reservoir.
>

I conceed that it's possible, but my point is it's so unlikely that I think you'd be far
better of worrying about something else - like being hit by an asteroid :-)

I'm not a Virologist (just your bog-standard molecular biologist) so I'd conceed to 
someone with more specialist knowledge, but my understanding of this is that at the
molecular level the process of the virus taking over the cellular machinery is very host
specific.  There a a considerable number of steps, all of which require precise
protein-protein or RNA/protein interactions to work.  This sort of thing is very sensitive
to changes in protein amino acid sequence, glycosylation etc etc, hence the great
difficulty any virus will have jumping the species barrier.

It does happen, but in overall terms very, very rarely.  And cases where the new host is a
substantially different species are even rarer.  Rabies is the only one I can think off,
and although I'm sure there are others, compared to the total number of viruses they are
in a very small minority indeed.

Remember, Ebola is NOT widespread.  This would not be the situation if the alternative
host was something common like rats of roaches.  The odds are it's going to be some as yet
unidentified monkey species, and as Ebola's had a hard enough job jumping across the
narrow simian/human divide (Our DNA is 98% identical to chimps), it's unlikely to go much
further.

Kevin