Prox O Authors' Ebola Blueprint
The 2013-14 (I'm not convinced about the 13 part) was the first ever Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It was less deadly than previous versions, but more contagious.
28,646 confirmed and suspected cases documented
11,323 recorded deaths
The largest outbreak of EVD on record - by far.
The evolution of Ebola virus: Insights from the 2013-2016 epidemic. (Nature paywall: $32 for a 6-page paper! Sponsored by Wellcome VIZIONS - how does that fit with Wellcome's policy in support of open and unrestricted access to research literature? You can buy a whole book on the outbreak by Constantine Nana for $7-8 - way more insights.)
Pub: Nature, October 2016.
First sentence:
The 2013–2016 Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic in West Africa appears to have begun following human contact with an animal (probably bat) reservoir of Ebola virus (EBOV) in December 2013, in the small village of Meliandou in Guéckédou Prefecture, Guinea.
Straight off the bat, the authors promulgate/imprint an unsubstantiated origin narrative, citing a paper by Baize et al - the toddler, the hollow tree, the remote village of Meliandou, Guniea - it's the pangolin narrative of the day. They are all careful to sneak in the odd appears and may haves but no alternatives are ever presented - it keeps getting repeated and repeated. It's a deliberate, effective process.
As a story, it sounds about right: - deadly bat pathogens lurking in the forests of deepest, darkest Africa, infecting, as Farrar writes in his own VIZIONS project: a cohort of high risk individuals .. engaging in bushmeat hunting behaviour.
Fits the bill of what the public will believe. But is it true?
For a start, individuals engaging in bushmeat hunting behaviour has been going on since individuals existed. But Ebola has only been around since 1976.
Secondly, the strain of Ebola that sparked the outbreak is 97% identical with the Kikwit-95 strain (97%) from the 95 Zaire outbreak. They're different but related.
Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo - as my uncle said - if a country has got democratic in it's name, it's not) is about 4000km away from Guinea.
Q: How did it travel so far without infecting anyone along the way?
I'm thinking: aeroplane.
Carried in by a scientist courier - for research purposes - to help wage war on the threat of a non-existent bioterrorism.
Don't take my word for it - Andersen, who was co-leading a mission in Sierra Leone from 2010-14 to fight bioterrorism, co-authors a June 2016 Cell paper, Roots not Parachutes, lamenting there was a lot of gung ho behaviour going on in the international science community at that precise time:
In some instances, researchers 'parachuted' into the affected countries, conducted research in isolation, and departed without creating sustainable infrastructure or a lasting impact. In several cases, international scientists with no established collaborations in West Africa allegedly transported samples back to their home countries for further research, in many cases without permission or knowledge of the affected nations (Heymann et al., 2016).
In other words:
illegal smuggling of Ebola by international scientists
- according to Kristian Andersen, citing Heymann et al.
How can that even be written in an academic paper published by Cell - and not spark a criminal investigation?
International Scientists smuggling the deadly Ebola virus - sorry, i can't get over that.
That's the hide-in-plain-sight behaviour that the real cohort of high risk individuals gets away with inside the international science scene.
Oddly, there was no talk of that behaviour in Andersen's parallel 2016 paper a few months late with Holmes and Rambaut, titled The evolution of the Ebola virus: Insights ... In this evolution story:
It is believed that bats serve as the primary reservoir for EBOV. .. (T)he origin and spread of the 2013–2016 EVD epidemic seem well resolved.
appears - probably - seems - believed
In fact, Baize's paper reports the first confirmed case was in a Health worker at Gueckedou hospital, Guinea on Feb 23. It speculates about a chain of 12 unconfirmed but suspected cases, going back 83 days, to the bat tree on Dec 2 - that may have lead to the first confirmed case but notes the epidemiologic links are not well established. Including how the health worker (who spread it to several others and who represents the take-off case) contracted the disease.
Indeed, in a Sep 2014 paper, who's authors include Andersen, Garry, and Rambaut, it's stated that: The current outbreak started in February 2014 in Guinea, West Africa (3) - citing the exact same Baize et al paper.
Source: Andersen, Garry, Rambaut et al Sep 2014. Note: Kenema was the site of Andersen and Garry's Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium formed in 2010 to research diagnostics in the war on bioterrorism.
That amounts to academic skulduggery by Holmes, Andersen, Rambaut. The very paper they cite to say the Dec 2 Meliandou origin is well resolved - says it's not well established - a fact they acknowledged in the 2014 paper. So why has that been airbrushed out in the 2016 paper? You could say well, we had more information - but there wasn't - it's based on the same paper.
Baize's not well established theory, in turn, is based on what he calls initial epidemiologic investigation that he doesn't cite but it appears to be a Fabian Leendertz expedition.
Let's going exploring with Fabian in West Africa ...