Editorial

Abstract

August 2014: The World Health Organization-WHO rates the Ebola epidemics as a world health emergency and considers it the worst outbreak of the virus in history, since it was discovered in 1976. The world health emergencies alternate from time to time and the incidence of the Ebola virus in the eastern region of the African continent has caused over a thousand deaths. In the first week of August alone, according to WHO, 108 new cases were confirmed and 45 deaths were recorded in the four countries most affected by the disease: Republic of Guinea, Liberia, Serra Leone and Nigeria. So far, the three known measures to control Ebola outbreaks-hospital infection control, knowledge by the community about infection risks and tracking those infected-do not seem to have been sufficiently applied. The Ebola outbreaks started in 1976, in Nzara, in Sudan, and in Yambuku, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and later spread to other countries, especially to remote villages in Central and Eastern Africa, neighboring tropical forests. According to the WHO, the contact with infected chimpanzees, gorillas, bats, monkeys, porcupines and antelopes triggered the propagation to humans, who, in turn, can contaminate other humans, too. As a preventive measure, specialists also warn that animal products (blood and meat) must be well cooked before being eaten. Albeit serious, the Ebola epidemic is usually restrained to the African continent and, in terms of prevention, to the adequate application of biosafety rules. This has been the third emergency situation declared by the WHO, after the avian influenza (bird flu) in Asia, in 2009 and of poliomyelitis in the Middle East in May 2014. The issue motivating us to bring this theme up to the editorial of the Revista A&S issue is the fact that, according to experts, the propagation of emergent diseases is closely associated to human interventions in the environment. In a recent interview to the North-American media, an epidemiologist with the NGO EcoHealth Alliance who researches Ebola and other infectious diseases, Jonathan Epstein, stated that the greatest incidence of Ebola may be associated to the environmental impacts resulting from the agricultural expansion and of deforesting, making it easier for pathogens to move from animal hosts to people circulating in the world. Eastern Africa, the region most affected by the epidemics, has experienced great environmental changes in the last years. The report elaborated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRI), published in 2013, shows that, in Sierra Leone (the epicenter of the outbreak), climate change has caused seasonal droughts, strong winds, storms, landslides, heat waves, floods and changes in the rain pattern. WHO observes that a recent increment in infectious diseases seems to correspond to the increase in global temperatures, although it is not possible to prove a causal relationship between those facts.