Ebola outbreak originated from boy playing near bats

A 2-year-old boy has been identified as “patient zero” of the Ebola virus. He was also the first victim to die from the dreaded infectious disease in a village in Guinea in late 2013.

The first patient, a boy described as “hyperactive,” was named Emile Ouamouno. Before the disease took his life, he was seen playing near a tree that was home to a colony of free-tailed bats.

Two-year-old boy Emile was recorded as the first case of Ebola in the current outbreak. Photo: news24.org.uk

Sudden onset of high fever, vomiting and black diarrhea, the boy died on December 6, 2013, after only 4 days of illness. Following this loss, the family witnessed the deaths of his older sister Philomene, mother and grandmother.

According to News24, other mysterious deaths continued to appear in the village and surrounding areas. However, it was not until March 2014 that the culprit was officially recognized as the Ebola virus.

The outbreak marked the world's worst Ebola epidemic on record, spreading rapidly to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and then across Africa to Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom. More than 7,800 people worldwide have died.

To find out why the outbreak was so severe and how the first death occurred, scientists from Germany's Robert Koch Institute for Science went directly to the scene to check for possible human contact with bats, survey local wildlife, and capture and sample bats in the village of Meliandou and surrounding forests.

A large tree cavity where a colony of free-tailed bats live is believed to be the source of the Ebola virus, causing the most terrible outbreak in history. Photo: news24.org.uk

Fruit bats are often suspected of carrying the Ebola virus and have been linked to previous outbreaks, scientists say. They are also often hunted by Africans for their meat. However, this outbreak is unlikely to be the source of infection. If this were true, many adults could have been infected before or at the same time as the 2-year-old boy Emile.

This argument leads to the possibility that the source of infection had nothing to do with bat-derived food, but that the 2-year-old boy had somehow come into contact with insectivorous free-tailed bats that lived in a large tree hollow where children in the village often gathered to play, catch and play with the animals.

One of the team, Dr Fabian Leendertz, said that Ebola could have been transmitted to humans through contact with other wild animals or directly with bats. However, in a paper published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, he said: “We have monitored other mammals living near the village of Meliandou in southeastern Guinea and found no evidence of a link to the ongoing outbreak.” According to Dr Fabian, contact with bats seems to be the most likely cause of the current outbreak.

According to VnExpress