Friends with Marburg!
Friends with Marburg - something you usually don’t want, since Marburg is, among other things, a hemorrhagic fever caused by a virus, similar to Ebola.
But, we’ve got some new friends who are infected with the Marburg virus - fruit bats! Here’s the link to the Yahoo news article.
For quite some time, we’ve been trying to find out who else, aside from monkeys and big apes like you and me, might have Marburg inside of them, so that we could find out how monkeys and apes become infected. Bats were suspected, but this is the first time they’ve ever been found with the virus.
Oh - all of this is happening in, like, Africa.
Now, we don’t know if the bats are the reservoir for the virus. A reservoir means a place the virus spends most of its days, hangin’ out, between outbreaks. Usually, the reservoir species does not suffer from the pathogen like other species might. An example? Plague, or Yersinia pestis. Y. pestis is quite common in rodents in the American Southwest, and only rarely causes illness in the rodent populations. The rodents are the reservoir for the bacteria, and the bacteria occasionally infect people, traveling from rodent to human by way of flea.
Anyway, like I said, these bats in Africa, the ones testing positive for Marburg, might not be the official reservoir. They could simply have been infected just like the monkeys and people. Maybe Marburg’s home is…I dunno…fruit flies. Maybe Marburg spends its days inside some kind of crazy bird.
Probably, though, it’s the bats.
Something fun about hemorrhagic fevers - they cause people to bleed out of pretty much every orifice, like eyeballs and noses and ears and all kinds of stuff. Not always, but sometimes.
We haven’t found the reservoir for Ebola yet, but bats, fruit bats, just like with Marburg, are suspected.
Here is a picture of some Marburg virions. Virions are little virus particles. I thought this picture was cute, ’cause it looks like a baby bird asking for food, no?
CDC/ F. A. Murphy; Cynthia Goldsmith
Please - don’t feed the Marburg.
Since I don’t think baby birds are hot, I’m not gonna call this one hot. Cute, perhaps. Yes, cute.
Marburg, hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, bats, Africa, reservoir, plague, Yersinia pestis
