The story of how Ebola got its name is short and somewhat random, according to Piots account in his book. Late one night, the group of scientists discussed over Kentucky bourbon what the virus they were hunting should be named. The virus had surfaced in a village called Yambuku, so it could be named after the village, argued one team member, Dr. Pierre Sureau, of the Institut Pasteur in France, Piot recalls. But naming the virus Yambuku would run the risk of stigmatizing the village, said another scientist, Dr. Joel Breman, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This had happened before, for example, in the case of Lassa virus, which emerged in the town of Lassa in Nigeria in 1969. It was Karl Johnson, another researcher from the CDC, and the leader of the research team, who suggested naming the virus after a river, to tone down the emphasis on a particular place. One obvious option would have been the Congo River, which is the deepest river in the world and flows through the country and its rainforest. But there was a problem—another virus with a similar name already existed. That virus was the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus. So the scientists looked at a small map, pinned up on the wall, for any other rivers near Yambuku. On the map, it appeared that the closest river to Yambuku was called Ebola, meaning Black River, in the local language Lingala. It seemed suitably ominous, Piot writes. However, the map was inaccurate, and the Ebola river turned out not to be the closest river to Yambuku, Piot says. But in our entirely fatigued state, thats what we ended up calling the virus: Ebola. And so Ebola joined the list of viruses named after rivers. Other members include the mosquito-borne Ross river virus, which causes a debilitating infection and is named after a river in northern Queensland in Australia, and the Machupo virus, which causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, or black typhus, and is named after a Bolivian river.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 02:51:40 +0000
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