New viruses are popping up all over these days – Heartland virus
in Missouri last month, a new virus in the same family as SARS
in Saudi Arabia this month. And now, a never-before-seen
hemorrhagic fever virus in central Africa. It's called Bas-Congo
virus after the province where it was found just west of
Kinshasa, the teeming capital of the Democratic Republic of
Congo. The discovery was announced today in the journal PLoS
Pathogens. So far only three people in the remote village of
Mangala are known to have contracted Bas-Congo hemorrhagic
fever, two of whom died. One was a health care worker who cared
for the other two villagers, which means it can apparently be
transmitted from person to person, although no one knows how
easily. But the small number of known cases is actually one of
the important things about this finding. It signifies that
scientists may have found an emerging disease very soon after it
made its jump from whatever species it came from into humans.
We'll come back to its most likely origi