LET ME START by saying that I am honored to be invited to contribute to this forum. In the interest of honest disclosure, I am not a theologian. My sole academic credential in this area is an undergraduate degree in religion from Duke. Rather, I am an epidemiologist, and have focused my work over the past thirty years on researching and writing about the broad intersection between medicine and religion. For this reason, I suspect, I have been invited to weigh in here.
But, first, some housekeeping: Ebola is a viral hemorrhagic fever, one of several that are known to cause disease in humans, also including Marburg, Lassa, and Crimean-Congo. These diseases are typically zoonotic—they reside in animal reservoirs—and secondary (person-to-person) transmission among human hosts is generally through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, either directly or via contact with fomites (contaminated items). They are caused by a variety of RNA viruses from different families (several species of ebolavirus are in the EBOV genus of the Filoviridae family), and they produce a wide spectrum of signs and symptoms, typified by high fever, hypotension/shock, multi-organ dysfunction, and bleeding diathesis (hemorrhaging). There have been several outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF; a.k.a. Ebola virus disease, or EVD) since the first reported epidemic in Central Africa in 1976. These also have occurred in Central Africa and were characterized by severe human suffering and case fatality rates as high as 90 percent.1 The scope of this suffering, in number of victims and in rapid physical deterioration, as described in news stories, popular books, and fictionalized movies, has contributed to the horrifying images evoked by the word “Ebola.”
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