03-24-2020, 10:24 AM
(03-24-2020, 10:15 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Anything on West Nile and Ebola?
I did not know that Google didn't work in some parts of the country.
![Smirk Smirk](http://i.imgur.com/dO89fQF.gif)
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Nile_virus
Quote:West Nile Virus (WNV) is a virus that belongs to the genus Flavivirus. It causes an infectious disease called "West Nile virus disease" or just "West Nile virus."[1] WNV mainly infects birds, but it can also infect humans, horses, dogs, bats, cats, reptiles,[2][3] and amphibians.[1][/url]
West Nile virus is spread by mosquitoes, who get the virus from birds. If a mosquito bites a bird that has WNV, and then bites a human, that person can get West Nile Virus.[1]
West Nile virus was first discovered in 1937, in the West Nile area of Uganda, in East Africa.[1] (This is how the virus got its name.) However, before the 1990s, there were very few cases of WNV. Then there was an outbreak in Algeria in 1994 and another in Romania in 1996.[1] By 2004, the virus had spread to North America,[4] the Caribbean islands, and Latin America. It continues to spread through Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, and the United States.[4] In 2012, one of the worst West Nile virus epidemics yet happened in the United States; 286 people died.[5][6]
So it is named after the region...it not called the "Uganda Virus".
And I'm glad you brought Ebola.
[url=https://www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.html]https://www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.html
Quote:The story of how Ebola got its name is short and somewhat random, according to Piot's account in his book. Late one night, the group of scientists discussed over Kentucky bourbon what the virus they were hunting should be named.
The virus had surfaced in a village called Yambuku, so it could be named after the village, argued one team member, Dr. Pierre Sureau, of the Institut Pasteur in France, Piot recalls.
But naming the virus Yambuku would run the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeria in 1969.
It was Karl Johnson, another researcher from the CDC, and the leader of the research team, who suggested naming the virus after a river, to tone down the emphasis on a particular place.
One obvious option would have been the Congo River, which is the deepest river in the world and flows through the country and its rainforest. But there was a problem—another virus with a similar name already existed. That virus was the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus.
So the scientists looked at a small map, pinned up on the wall, for any other rivers near Yambuku. On the map, it appeared that the closest river to Yambuku was called Ebola, meaning "Black River," in the local language Lingala.
"It seemed suitably ominous," Piot writes.
However, the map was inaccurate, and the Ebola river turned out not to be the closest river to Yambuku, Piot says.
"But in our entirely fatigued state, that's what we ended up calling the virus: Ebola."
And so Ebola joined the list of viruses named after rivers. Other members include the mosquito-borne Ross river virus, which causes a debilitating infection and is named after a river in northern Queensland in Australia, and the Machupo virus, which causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, or "black typhus," and is named after a Bolivian river.
Many other viruses, too, have been named after a feature of their place of origin, including West Nile virus discovered in 1937, coxsackievirus discovered in 1948 (Coxsackie is a town in New York), Marburg virus discovered in 1967 (Marburg is a town in Germany), and Hendra virus identified 1994 (Hendra is a suburb of Brisbane, Australia).
None of them, not one uses the name of the place that also refers to the ethnicity of people living there.
And I'll add (again) everyone knows what the Coronavirus is, or COVID-19, is. There is zero reason, none to anyone let alone the POTUS to refer to it as the "Chinese Virus" (other than to distract from his previous statements about how it was nothing and it would be gone soon).
![[Image: giphy.gif]](https://media0.giphy.com/media/1kwsTjL8BNqlszNtnCE/giphy.gif)
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.