Second deadliest Ebola outbreak in the world ends 0:43
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (CNN) -
Showing the first symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, a patient sits quietly on her bed, arguing with two young children desperate to flee a cell-shaped hospital room in Ingende, a city remote in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
They are waiting for the results of an Ebola test.
The patient can only communicate with family members through a transparent plastic observation window.
Her identity is secret, to protect her from being ostracized by locals who fear Ebola infection.
Their children were also examined but, for now, they show no symptoms.
So far, there is a vaccine and a treatment for Ebola, which have reduced the death rate.
But the question at the back of everyone's mind is: What if this woman doesn't have Ebola?
What if, instead, she is patient zero of "Disease X", the first known infection of a new pathogen that could sweep the world as fast as COVID-19, but has a mortality rate of 50 % to 90% of Ebola?
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Doctor Dadin Bonkole works in the Ebola red zone at Ingende Hospital.
"We all have to be afraid," said the patient's doctor, Dr. Dadin Bonkole.
'Ebola was unknown.
The covid was unknown.
We have to be afraid of new diseases.
Disease X, a threat to humanity
Humanity faces an unknown number of new and potentially fatal viruses emerging from the rainforests of Africa, according to Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, who helped discover the Ebola virus, in 1976, and has been on the front lines of the search for new pathogens since then.
"We are now in a world where new pathogens will emerge," he told CNN.
"And that is what constitutes a threat to humanity."
When he was a young researcher, Muyembe took the first blood samples from victims of a mysterious disease that caused bleeding and killed approximately 88% of the patients and 80% of the staff working at the Yambuku Mission Hospital when the disease was discovered.
The blood vials were shipped to Belgium and the United States, where scientists found a worm-shaped virus.
They called it "Ebola," after the river near the outbreak in the country that was then known as Zaire.
The identification of Ebola was based on a chain connecting the most remote parts of the rainforests of Africa with high-tech laboratories in the West.
Now, the West must rely on African scientists in the Congo and elsewhere to act as sentinels to warn against future diseases.
In Ingende, fears of encountering a deadly new virus remained very real even after the recovery of the patient showing symptoms that resembled Ebola.
Their samples were analyzed on the spot and sent to the Congolese National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) in Kinshasa, where further tests were conducted to detect other diseases with similar symptoms.
Everything came out negative, the disease that affected her remains a mystery.
Speaking exclusively to CNN in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa, Muyembe warned of many more zoonotic diseases, those that jump from animals to humans, to come.
Yellow fever, various forms of influenza, rabies, brucellosis, and Lyme disease are among those transmitted from animals to humans, often through a vector such as a rodent or an insect.
These have caused epidemics and pandemics before.
HIV arose from one type of chimpanzee and became a modern global plague.
SARS, MERS, and the virus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2, are all coronaviruses that jumped to humans from unknown "reservoirs."
The latter is a term used by virologists for the natural hosts of the virus, in the animal kingdom.
Covid-19 is believed to have originated in China, possibly in bats.
Does Muyembe think that future pandemics could be worse than covid-19, more apocalyptic?
"Yes, yes, I think so," he said.
New viruses on the rise
Since the first animal-to-human infection, yellow fever, was identified in 1901, scientists have found at least 200 other viruses known to cause disease in humans.
According to research by Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, new virus species are being discovered at the rate of three to four per year.
Most of them come from animals.
Experts say the growing number of emerging viruses is largely the result of ecological destruction and the wildlife trade.
As their natural habitats disappear, animals such as rats, bats, and insects survive where the larger animals are exterminated.
They can live alongside humans and are often suspected of being the vectors that can transmit new diseases to humans.
A passenger ship stops to rest on the shores of Ingende. These ships can take weeks to reach Kinshasa downstream.
Scientists have linked previous Ebola outbreaks to a heavy human foray into the rainforest.
In a 2017 study, researchers used satellite data to determine that 25 of the 27 Ebola outbreaks located along the boundaries of the rainforest biome in central and western Africa, between 2001 and 2014, started in places that had experienced deforestation about two years earlier.
They added that zoonotic outbreaks of Ebola appeared in areas where human population density was high and where the virus has favorable conditions, but that the relative importance of forest loss is partially independent of these factors.
In the first 14 years of the 21st century, an area larger than the size of Bangladesh was cut down in the rainforest of the Congo River basin.
The United Nations has warned that if current trends in deforestation and population growth continue, the country's rainforest may be completely gone by the end of the century.
As that happens, animals and the viruses they carry will collide with people in new and often disastrous ways.
But it does not have to be like that.
The costs of the pandemic
A multidisciplinary group of scientists based in the United States, China, Kenya and Brazil has calculated that a global investment of US $ 30 billion a year in projects to protect rainforests, stop wildlife trade and agriculture would be enough to compensate the cost of preventing future pandemics.
In an article in the journal Science, the group said that spending $ 9.6 billion a year on global forest protection schemes could lead to a 40% reduction in global deforestation in areas at the highest risk of spreading the virus.
This could include incentivizing and earning a living from forest people, and prohibiting widespread logging and commercialization of the wildlife trade.
A similar program in Brazil led to a 70% decrease in deforestation between 2005 and 2012, the scientists said.
While $ 30 billion a year may sound like a lot, scientists argue that the investment would pay off quickly.
The coronavirus pandemic will cost the United States only an estimated $ 16 trillion over the next 10 years, according to Harvard economists David Cutler and Larry Summers, a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
The IMF estimates that, globally, the pandemic will cost $ 28 trillion in lost production between 2020 and 2025, relative to pre-pandemic projections.
Bush meat market in the port of Kinshasa.
Smoked fish is sold here.
The «Disease X»
"Disease X" may be disappearing within any of these animals, brought into the metropolis by poor people who serve the likes of the rich for exotic foods and pets.
“Bush meat here in urban areas, contrary to popular misconception, is not for the poor, it is for the rich and privileged, so there are high-ranking officials who believe in the superstition that if If you eat a certain type of bushmeat, it will give you strength, ”said Cassinga.
There are also people who consume it as a status symbol.
But also in the last 10 to 20 years we have experienced an influx of expatriates, mainly from Southeast Asia, who demand to eat certain types of meat such as turtles, snakes, primates.
Scientists have previously linked these types of wet markets to zoonotic diseases.
The H5N1 influenza virus, known as bird flu, and SARS emerged from them.
The exact origin of the coronavirus that causes covid-19 has not been confirmed.
But the greatest suspicion about its origin has fallen on the "wet" markets where live animals are sold and slaughtered for meat.
The marketing of bushmeat is a potential route of infection.
It is also a symptom of the devastation of the Congo rainforest, the second largest in the world after the Amazon.
Most of the destruction is driven by local farmers, who depend economically on the forest: 84% of forest clearing is to make room for small-scale agriculture.
However, the slash and burn techniques used by locals increase human exposure to this once-virgin territory and its wild animals, a major risk factor for the disease.
«If you go to the forest ... you will change the ecology;
and insects and rats will leave this place and come to the villages… so this is the transmission of the virus, of the new pathogens, ”said Muyembe.
Discovering a new virus
Back at Ingende Hospital, the doctors wear all the protective gear that can be found: goggles, yellow biohazard coveralls, double-taped gloves, hoods over the head and shoulders, overshoes over shoes, and face masks. complex.
They are still concerned that the patient we spoke about at the beginning may be showing symptoms of an Ebola-like illness that is not, in fact, Ebola.
It may be a new virus, it may also be one of the many illnesses that afflict people here that are already known to science, but none of the tests performed here have explained their high fever and diarrhea.
"We receive cases that look a lot like Ebola, but then when we do the tests, they come back negative," said the head of Medical Services at Ingende, Dr. Christian Bompalanga.
"We have to carry out additional examinations to see what is really going on ... at the moment there are a couple of suspected cases out there," he added, pointing to the isolation room where the young woman and her children are being treated.
And weeks later, there is no clear diagnosis of his disease.
Once a new virus begins to circulate among humans, the consequences of a brief encounter at the edge of a forest or in a wet market could be devastating.
Covid-19 has proven it.
Ebola has proven it.
And most scientific publications assume that there will be more infections as humans continue to destroy wild habitats.
It is not a "YES", it is a "WHEN".
The solution is clear.
Protect the forests to protect humanity, because mother nature has deadly weapons in her arsenal.
- CNN's Ingrid Formanek and Ivana Kottasová contributed to this report. Thanks to Dr. Meris Matondo and Dr. Richard Ekila of INRB, the National Institute for Biomedical Research of the Congo, for their guidance during the reporting of this story.
Ebola Disease X