But how exactly does it work?

Where did it come from?

Wire.

It's outbreaks so difficult to contain, and is there any hope of getting rid of it once and for all?

There's no question about it.

Ebola is terrifying with the potential to kill within a week and a death rate that's been as high as 90%.

The specter of this violent disease is still very much at large in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's time to move from a purely reactive strategy when there's an outbreak.

We also need to think of primary prevention and pay to pee out.

And I'm the director of the long school Hygiene Opportunity.

I was part of the team that isolated the Ebola virus for the first time.

It may surprise you that they're not one, but two exciting experimental vaccines and use in the DRC and more in the works.

But before we get to these promising breakthroughs, we have to dive into the surprising place Evil may have gotten a start.

Fruit bats.

The virus is actually an accidental virus for US humans because it's a virus that lives happily in some butts.

When that virus crosses the species barrier, then the mortality is extremely high.

There's a couple different patterns that occur.

One is that someone hunts an animal that is infected with the virus, and they catch it because they're exposed to the water body fluids or they're preparing the food that was caught.

My name is John Massagee.

I am a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the National Institute of Health Vaccine Research Center.

I've been working on Ebola since 2005.

The family of viruses Ebola is part of is the fuel virus family, which in Latin means string.

Like viruses, they're long and Philip mentis.

They can be up to, Ah, Micron and Link, so it's quite quite big for a virus.

When a person contracts Ebola, typically through contact with the blood or other bodily fluids of an infected person, the virus begins to wreak havoc in every area of your body.

But at first it may not present any signs at all.

There's the hot zone on outbreak version of Ebola, which tends to be very traumatized, and their reality is that that is the least common presentation for Ebola through the gallery thing about four stages and infection.

The first is an incubation period where you've been exposed to the virus, but you haven't yet shown signs or symptoms of illness, and that kid last anywhere from 4 to 21 days.

The second stage of the disease progresses with symptoms like fever and muscle aches making it difficult to distinguish from other flu like illnesses.

The telltale signs of Ebola don't typically appear until the third stage, about 3 to 6 days.

After these symptoms begin, people start having fluid losses like diarrhea and vomiting.

The classic things is a rash that you can see on their body, and that's one of the the clues that you can get that perhaps this is a hemorrhagic fever or Ebola virus.

This happens because Ebola infects dendritic cells and macrophages, overloading the immune system like a lightning storm frying an electrical grid.

You just haven't overall what we call a sight, a kind storm.

Basically, your immune cells release signals that turn on inflammation, and so you have a giant inflammatory response.

Cells will put out a flag that says, Hey, I'm infected, come and kill me and Ebola stops, both the signal from being sent, as well as a signal from being received device can hide in places in the body that are difficult to reach by antibodies.

On that is in the eye fluid It's in the testes on dhe.

Also problem the brain.

The virus can also affect the liver.

The adrenal gland pan the gastrointestinal tract.

But its most dangerous invasion is into the endo feel cells that line the blood vessels.

The net reaction to that is that we would That's in your blood, leaks out into the tissues.

Your body basically is dehydrated in blood vessels.

And so when that happens, we call it shock.

In patients die of hyperbole Nick Shaq.

And that progression can happen in a matter of days.

The final stage of the disease is its most severe, when patients have lost a dangerous amount of blood and fluids into their tissues and experience a huge range of symptoms depending on which organs the virus has reached, that you are fortunate to survive.

You have a recovery phase as well.

While some patients do make it to that phase, has that the current outbreak only 66% will survive.

But now going to some promising trials in eastern Congo, experts are excited about two new drug therapies that could potentially reduce people of mortality rate by as much as 2/3 1 is monoclonal antibody and maybe 1 14 a single and a body isolated from a survivor of an outbreak in the 19 nineties.

And another one is re general.

Be free.

That's a therapeutic that also was shown to be effective.

But treatment is only half the battle.

Ebola outbreaks have become progressively harder to contain as they approach urban areas, and due to its disproportionate effect on health care workers, the ripple effects of the disease have been devastating.

This makes finding preventative measures a key priority to achieve that, too.

Experimental vaccines are currently in use in the DRC based on their success in previous outbreaks and phase two clinical trials.

The 1st 1 is the life attenuated vaccine.

Physical stomach.

Titus fires RVs fee.

That vaccine has now been used well over 250,000 people in the R.

C.

When you give it to the contacts off, someone with Ebola protection was close to 100%.

That vaccine, known as our VSP Zebo, or Bebo, was shown in field tests to be 97.5% protective against Ebola.

Second vaccine produced by Johnson and Johnson and that is a vaccine made off to does is one is a killed Adam 26 virus and that has the Ebola indigent.

And with a second injection off MBA vaccine that contains multiple antigens, various Ebola strains and also Barbara.

And that's just one of a handful of experimental vaccines and various trial phases.

Thier bimbo vaccine, recently approved by both U.

S and European governments, is currently being used in what's known as a ring vaccination strategy, essentially vaccinating everyone who may have come into contact with an Ebola patient.

Ring vaccination was used to eradicate smallpox and later, along with strong public health efforts, helped to finally get 2014 to 2016 outbreak in West Africa under control alongside the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which is being used in a targeted geographic vaccination strategy to protect villages regions at risk.

These vaccines are proving remarkably effective in the DRC and along its borders and will be the go to methods as we apply what we've learned so far too similar outbreaks in the future.

Governments came to gather informed large people what treatment units to be ableto handle the patients that were coming in and try various treatment regimens so that we could try to determine what might be more optimal care.

But whether developing protections or advancing cures, the keys to containing future outbreaks, flying cooperation, preparation and putting resource is in the hands of local communities.

When I look at the future of your boys, the first thing is that we need much better preparedness, and that means investing in the vulnerable Come please better laboratory infrastructure, regular surveillance off suspect cases and also possibility for deployment.

Make sure that the vaccines are licensed and are available and accessible and affordable.

When you deal with epidemics, time is of the essence.