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In 1976, a mysterious and deadly illness appeared almost simultaneously in the Sudan and Zaire. It killed with frightening speed, baffled doctors, and was eventually named after a river that few people had ever heard of, Ebola. Since then, it has caused some of the most feared outbreaks in modern history, while also driving major advances in medicine, vaccines, and global public health. Learn more about the deadly Ebola virus and the efforts to fight it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Most of you might have something that you're saving up for. Maybe it's the trip of a lifetime, your children, your retirement, or maybe even something nice for yourself. And if you're looking for some extra money, the easiest thing you can do is to cancel your current mobile plan and switch to Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile you can get high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network starting at only 15 bucks a month. Use your own phone and number, activate with ESIM in minutes and start saving immediately. No long term contracts and no hassle. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.com eed that's mintmobile.com eed upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5GB plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This episode is sponsored by Quint. I recently moved into a new, larger place and I faced the challenge of decorating it. I of course am turning to Quince to help get the job done. In addition to clothes, Quince offers stylish home furnishings that makes my place look great at affordable prices. And I've also recently picked up a second cashmere sweater that I've talked about before just because I like it so much. The great thing about Quince is that their prices are 50 to 60% lower than those of similar brands. How Quint's works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Everything is designed to last and makes getting dressed and decorating your home easy. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com daily for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I-N-E.com daily for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com daily. The very word Ebola Strikes terror into some people, and for good reason. Ebola is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. And it isn't just that it has an incredibly high mortality rate, which it does. It's that the way victims die is horrific and painful. Technically, ebola is not a single virus. It's a group of closely related viruses in the genus ebola virus. The one most people mean when they say ebola is zaire ebolavirus, the deadliest and most historically important member of the group. Ebola is rare compared with influenza or measles, but it has a reputation Unlike almost any other virus. When it does break into human populations, Ebola it can kill a very high percentage of those that it infects. Ebola viruses are categorized as filoviruses, from the latin word for thread, because under an electron microscope, they often appear as long filament like strands. Their natural reservoir remains unknown with complete certainty, but fruit bats are considered the leading suspect, and outbreaks often begin after some contact between wildlife and humans. Once affected, Ebola does not spread like measles or influenza. It's not mainly an airborne respiratory virus. It spreads through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of someone who is sick or who has died from the disease, or through contaminated objects Such as needles, bedding, or medical equipment. This is one reason Ebola can devastate families, Health workers, and burial teams, while while still being much less contagious in public settings Than other airborne viruses. The incubation period of Ebola is usually between 2 and 21 days. The center for disease control describes the early illness as dry symptoms, including fever, aches, pains, and fatigue. As the disease progresses, it can move into wet symptoms Such as vomiting, diarrhea, and unexplained bleeding. The bleeding is what made the older term Ebola hemorrhagic fever famous, but it's not always the most dominant sympt. The real danger is often a combination of massive fluid loss, Shock, organ dysfunction, Immune system overreaction, and problems of blood clotting. Severe cases can include abdominal pain, rashes, red eyes, confusion, Kidney and liver impairment, Internal bleeding, as well as bleeding from the gums, nose, or injection sites. Ebola is highly lethal, but the exact lethality depends on the strain of ebola, the outbreak, and the quality of care that someone gets. The world health organization gives an average Ebola disease case fatality rate of around 50%, with past outbreaks ranging from about 25%, all the way up to 90%. Ebola is one of the deadliest diseases in the world, but it's not the deadliest disease. On average, it has a higher mortality rate than things such as smallpox, but it's less than rabies, which has a 100% fatality rate. Rabies, however, is preventable after exposure if it is treated in time. Compared with other viruses, Ebola sits in an unusual position. It's far deadlier than seasonal influenza, measles, or most coronavirus infections on a case by case basis, but it's much less efficient at spreading through the air. Measles is one of the most contagious human viruses and spreads through breathing, coughing and sneezing, while Ebola normally requires contact with infectious fluids. In terms of lethality, Ebola is closer to the Marburg virus, another filovirus for which the World Health Organization reports an average fatality rate around 50% and past outbreaks ranging from 24% to 88%. We don't know when the Ebola virus first came into existence. It's probably existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years, primarily being transmitted by animals. If there was transmission to humans, it probably occurred in isolated communities or individuals and swept through quickly, given its high mortality rate. The Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976, when two simultaneous outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever occurred in two neighboring locations, one in southern Sudan and one in northern Zaire. The virus was first isolated from a woman named Miriam Louise Irkan, a 42 year old Belgian nursing sister working at the Yambuku Mission Hospital, who died caring for people with the unknown disease. When it came time to name the virus, the international team of scientists faced a deliberate choice when the commission considered naming it the Yambuku virus. Researchers Carl Johnson and Joel Bremen pointed out that naming the Lhasa virus after the Nigerian village where it was discovered had only brought stigma to the community. Johnson suggested naming the new virus after a nearby river instead. There was briefly a push to name it after the Congo river, the deepest river in the world. But another virus with a similar name, the Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, already existed. So scientists looked at a map pinned on the wall and found a nearby river called Ebola. There's actually some irony in the name. The Belgian name for the river is Lebola, which is actually a corruption of the indigenous Umbandi name Legbala, meaning white water or pure water. CO discoverer Dr. Peter Pio later acknowledged in his memoir that the map they used was inaccurate and that the Ebola river was not actually the closest river to Yambuku. But by then the name had already stuck. There are five subtypes of the Ebola Zaire, Sudan, Bundibugyo, Thai Forest, and Reston, each named after the location in which it was first identified. The first three subtypes have all been associated with large outbreaks in Africa. The Reston subtype is found in the western Pacific and, while highly dangerous to non human primates, is not known to cause illness in humans. The 1976 outbreak in Zaire was the first and set the template for the outbreaks that followed. The virus spread rapidly through the Yambuku Mission Hospital, where unsterilized needles were reused, infecting staff and forcing the facility to close. After multiple deaths, many infected people fled to their home villages out of fear, seeking treatment from traditional healers, which helped spread the disease further. That first outbreak resulted in 318 cases and 280 deaths. In 1995, an outbreak began among charcoal makers in the forest near the city of Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It led to 315 cases and 250 deaths. The virus spread through families and hospitals but was eventually stopped when healthcare workers began using face mask, gloves and gowns. In 2000 in Uganda, there were 425 Ebola cases and 224 deaths. The outbreak began in Gulu and spread to other districts. The strain involved was the Sudan virus and the median age of those infected was 27, though nearly 15% of the cases were children under the age of five. The largest Ebola outbreak in history came between the years 2013 and 2016. That outbreak in West Africa was the largest since the virus was first discovered in 1976, with more cases and more deaths than all previous outbreaks combined. It started in guinea and quickly spread to Sierra Leone and Liberia. By July 2014, it had reached the capital city of all three countries, and in August of 2014 the World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency of international concern. The disease ultimately spread to seven additional countries, including the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In total, there were 28,652 cases worldwide, with 11,325 reported deaths across 10 countries. A second major DRC outbreak between 2018 and 2020 was also significant, occurring in an active conflict zone and resulting in more than 3,000 cases, making it the largest outbreak in that country's history. As recently as September 2025, the DRC Ministry of Public Health declared an Ebola outbreak in the remote Kasai Province, which was contained by December 2025, with 53 confirmed cases and 45 deaths. It was the 16th Ebola outbreak in the DRC since 1976. The 2026 Ebola outbreak is a fast moving outbreak caused by the Bundibugyo variant centered in eastern DRC and now involving Uganda. As of the recording of this episode, the World Health Organization has reported over 800 suspected cases and over a hundred suspected deaths. So just how worried should you be about the Ebola virus? The short answer is not very. People should be concerned at a public health level, especially in the affected parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. But ordinary people in countries far from the outbreak should not be personally panicked. For most people outside the outbreak region, the risk is very, very low. It might sound odd to say, but because Ebola is so deadly, the odds of it ever spreading like the Black Death are very remote. It simply kills those infected too quickly for it to spread rapidly. Likewise, because it has to be spread via fluids, it's relatively easy to protect against using modern medical precautions. One concern that has been expressed is the fear of Ebola becoming an airborne virus. It is theoretically possible in the very broad sense that viruses can mutate, but extremely unlikely that Ebola would naturally become airborne in the way measles, chickenpox or influenza can be airborne. For Ebola to become truly airborne, it would have to change a lot. It would need to replicate well in the upper respiratory tract, be shed in large amounts from the nose, throat or lungs, survive in tiny suspended droplets and still affect another person after being inhaled. Those are not small tweaks to the virus. They would require a major change in the virus's biology, meaning the kind of cells and organs that it prefers to infect. And at that point it just wouldn't be Ebola anymore. There is actually some good news on the ebola front. The 2013-2016 epidemic was the largest Ebola outbreak to date. And it prompted numerous partners from the public and private sector combine efforts and resources to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible. The leading candidate was originally developed by experts at the Public Health Agency of Canada and later licensed to Merck. It uses a genetically engineered version of the vesicular stomatitis virus, an animal virus that primarily affects cattle to carry an Ebola virus gene insert which trains the immune system to recognize Ebola. The vaccine underwent pre clinical testing and then moved through phase 1, 2 and 3 clinical trials. A key trial in guinea in 2015 used a ring vaccination strategy, vaccinating the immediate contacts of confirmed cases and the contacts of those contacts. And the results were striking. Of the people vaccinated immediately. There were zero cases of Ebola in the weeks following the vaccination. In November 2019, the European Commission granted a conditional marketing authorization for the vaccine, now sold under the brand named Ervivo. The WHO pre qualification followed within 48 hours, the fastest vaccine pre qualification process in WHO history. It was then approved in the United States in December 2019. Irvivo was tested in approximately 16,000 individuals across multiple clinical studies in Africa, Europe and the United States before being approved. Its limitations, however, are notable as it specifically protects against the Zaire Ebola virus strain, which is the most dangerous but does not protect against the others. Ebola is bad, there's no doubt about it. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Public health organizations certainly should be concerned about it. However, it isn't something that most people should worry about unless they live in central or western Africa. The good news is that if progress on vaccines continue, maybe in the future, Ebola is something that no one anywhere will ever have to worry about again. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show Notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read on the show.