Ebola continues to spread in West Africa, to devastating effect. Documented cases have now surpassed 18,000, with over 7,000 dead — many more than in all previous Ebola outbreaks combined. The dead and suffering include many health workers whose sacrifices have both saddened and inspired. Ebola is a science-fiction nightmare come true.
But Ebola is not new. We have known about this virus and its deadly potential for four decades, since it first emerged to kill hundreds near Zaire’s Ebola River in 1976. Worldwide emergency measures are vital now. Several physicians I know will soon head to Sierra Leone to volunteer in Ebola treatment units. However, another vital battle is fought daily on an equally critical battlefield: the research laboratories in our nation’s universities.
There is little doubt that this particular epidemic can be extinguished if the right resources are brought to bear, though that could be many months and deaths from now. The rescue will cost billions and require concerted efforts of governments, nongovernmental organizations, health workers, safe burial teams and many others.
The two dozen cases in the U.S. and Europe so far and the transmissions to nurses in Dallas and Madrid underscore that Ebola is not just Africa’s problem. We will probably see further, sporadic importations into the U.S. (By the way, Denver’s designated hospitals and the medical school have prepared extensively for this contingency). However, I am confident that secondary transmissions to health workers and the public can be prevented effectively with the upgraded infection control practices now in place.
I am less confident that we as a society have learned another critical lesson, one that comes from seeing this fearful epidemic in proper context: Ebola is a zoonosis. That is, like most “emerging and re-emerging” infections, it came to us from an animal species.
The zoonosis we now call HIV-1 crossed into humans from chimpanzees, also in West Africa. SARS virus came to us from bats in southeast Asia. For Ebola, bats are also the likely source. Ebola is not an airborne virus (and, contrary to some recent speculation, it is extremely unlikely to evolve that capacity). By contrast, a new influenza virus that might emerge by rearranging its genetic material in pigs and fowl in Asia could spread via the air and kill many, many more than Ebola has.
There are numerous other viral threats, such as Dengue, Chikungunya, Nipah, MERS and recently, right here in Denver, Enterovirus D68. Last week, one of my high school classmates came very close to dying from that virus in Pennsylvania. Because population growth, migration, deforestation and other pressures are expanding what virologists call the human-animal interface, perhaps most concerning are infectious agents yet unknown and unnamed, akin to HIV-1 in 1981.
Scientific research, not reactive emergency quarantine and treatment campaigns, is what solved past infectious disease problems like polio and measles, saving countless lives and vast sums of money down the generations. Research is what produced penicillin and the miracle drugs that rendered HIV/AIDS manageable. It is hard, inspiring work. While I too laugh at the characters on “The Big Bang Theory,” the real scientists I know ,down the hall and across the campus are not nerdy, neurotic misfits, but the opposite: heroic adventurers into the unknown.
And yet we starve this intellectual enterprise. Viewed against the scale of the threats, the amount America spends on research to prevent these terrible epidemics from happening, or to treat the afflicted effectively when they do, is dismayingly tiny. The substantial fall in funding by the National Institutes of Health over the past decade has led many promising young biomedical scientists to abandon the goal of a research career. Established scientists have been forced to shut their labs.
We need to support the heroes in our laboratories. We need much more investment in fundamental scientific research into preventing and treating emerging infectious diseases.
Eric Poeschla is head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine at the Anschutz Medical Campus.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
