Ebola Virus Project
by: Jose Hernandez
What is Ebola?
What are the symptoms?
Ebola symptoms may include
- diarrhea,
- stomach pain and loss of appetite,
- cough, sore throat, and difficulty swallowing,
- rash,
- hiccups,
- chest pain,
- breathing problems.
How can Ebola be prevented?
There is no FDA-approved vaccine available for Ebola.
If you travel to or are in an area affected by an Ebola outbreak, make sure to do the following:
- Practice careful hygiene. For example, wash your hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand sanitizer and avoid contact with blood and body fluids.
- Do not handle items that may have come in contact with an infected person’s blood or body fluids (such as clothes, bedding, needles, and medical equipment).
- Avoid funeral or burial rituals that require handling the body of someone who has died from Ebola.
- Avoid contact with bats and nonhuman primates or blood, fluids, and raw meat prepared from these animals.
- Avoid facilities in West Africa where Ebola patients are being treated. The U.S. embassy or consulate is often able to provide advice on facilities.
- After you return, monitor your health for 21 days and seek medical care immediately if you develop symptoms of Ebola.
What causes Ebola?
Ebola virus disease (EVD; also Ebola hemorrhagic fever, or EHF), or simply Ebola, is a disease of humans and other primates caused by ebolaviruses. Signs and symptoms typically start between two days and three weeks after contracting the virus with a fever, sore throat, muscle pain, and headaches.
Ebola is not known to infect people through the air -- you must come into contact with the virus somehow in order to be at risk for infection. It's transmitted through exposure to an animal that carries the virus (such as a bat or primate), through exposure to the bodily fluids of a human who is infected and symptomatic, and through exposure to items that have been contaminated with the virus. People who are providing care for a household member ... when they're cleaning up vomit or diarrhea, they come into contact [with the virus], and the way it's transmitted is there's virus in the fluids. That virus gets into your own body through the nose, mouth and such
Ebola can also survive outside the host for a significant period of time -- as long as a couple of days -- at room temperature.