To:               virology@net.bio.net
From:             edregis@aol.com (EdRegis)
Subject:          Re: The Ebola virus - the end of the civilized world
Date sent:        28 Aug 1995 09:44:10 -0400
Send reply to:    edregis@aol.com (EdRegis)

Ed Rybicki says:
>perhaps the only 
involvement of the US military is probably that of USAMRID, who were
involved 
in the Ebola Reston incident (in terms of cleaning it up).

In fact, USAMRIID is doing lots of testing of the Kikwit Ebola strain,
including inoculating guinea pigs with the virus, among other things.  

Yes, I've seen them with my own eyes.
Ed (The other Ed)
edregis@aol.com


To:               virology@net.bio.net
From:             grobinso@mailer.fsu.edu (Gary J. Robinson)
Subject:          Re: The Ebola virus - the end of the civilized world
Date sent:        29 Aug 1995 22:56:11 GMT

I am just curious: when people went to Mount Elgon or whatever it's called
to look for Marburg, did they only sample animal life?  When reading
"Outbreak" and the cave was being discussed (Kitum Cave?  sp?)  I
immediately thought of slime molds, animalcules, lichens etc. on the rocks
where someone could have cut his finger.  Was any of this type of slime
sampled, or just insects, reptiles, birds and mammals?

Is it impossible for a plant virus to infect animals?

[see posts on ebopage.html]

-- A curious layman.


To:               virology@net.bio.net
From:             grobinso@mailer.fsu.edu (Gary J. Robinson)
Subject:          Re: The Ebola virus - the end of the civilized world
Date sent:        Wed, 30 Aug 1995 00:23:17 -0600

Does anyone know whether any animal or insect species has been innoculated
with Ebola Zaire and had 0% mortality?  In the book "Outbreak" they
mentioned monkeys and guinea pigs as dropping dead after being innoculated
but they never mentioned any species as being immune to Zaire or Sudan
strains. 

   The thought occured to me that if you started innoculating
representative animals from each species native to the area of the
outbreaks, any that proved immune were possible hosts.  Might be a good
way to narrow down the field of possible hosts.  Working backwards toward
the host instead of trying to find it in the wild with virus already in
it.  This way you could automatically skip any species that died quickly
in captivity when innoculated.  It should not involve any more work than
collecting and sampling them all in the wild; instead of killing them and
sampling them, just capture them and innoculate them instead back at the
lab.  That way, if the innoculated one quickly dies you can literally
write off the entire species; with sampling all you can conclude is that
the one you caught didn't happen to have the virus, which does not prove
other individuals of that species might not be hosts. Just a thought.

-- An ignorant but curious layman

-- 
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|    Gary J. Robinson     |       ". . . such fine, fat beasts."            |

[have any idea how much WORK that would be???  Highly unrealistic.  - Ed



To:               virology@net.bio.net
From:             JOHANN72@IDA.RUC.DK
Subject:          Locating Ebola host animal
Date sent:        30 Aug 1995 04:32:17 -0700

It seems, that a lot of the effort about finding the ebola host animal 
is used on the Kitum Cave. Has it ocurred to anyone, that the fact that 
two of the infected persons actually went into Kitum Cave could be 
nothing but a coincidence? Kitum Cave is apparently a very popular sight 
in Kenya, i have a friend, who actually went to visit it (he didn't 
catch Ebola, though). Maybe the researchers should concentrate on 
something else.