Ebola: 'Like watching someone dissolve'

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) -- At first you feel a dull aching in your joints and a slight tightening of the chest and sinuses. It could be a cold, or even a touch of the flu.

Within hours, you will start to sweat and experience feverish shifts in temperature. Perhaps it wasn't flu after all, but malaria picked up on that African holiday.

Within days you are likely to be in tooth-grinding agony. It is painful to open your eyes and your head feels as if it is about to explode. Bafflingly, doctors still have no idea what is wrong with you.

Only once you start bleeding from every orifice -- including your eyes and ears -- might they suspect you have the Ebola virus. By then it will almost certainly be too late.

"It is a really nasty disease. It is like watching someone dissolve before your eyes," said Barbera Kerstiens, a Belgian doctor who worked on Ebola during an outbreak in the Congo two years ago.

Ugandan and United Nations health authorities on Monday confirmed that the deadly disease which has killed at least 43 people in northern Uganda in the last two weeks is the Ebola virus, one of the most terrifying infections known to mankind.

You cannot be vaccinated against it, and there is no cure. Doctors can merely try to treat the problems that the virus is causing. But with even the best medical treatment available, the survival rate is less than three patients in 10.

Not only is it highly contagious, it is also super-fast and can kill within 48 hours..

Finally, it is a horrific way to die -- your blood literally pouring out of veins and arteries into your body and out through your eyes, ears and mouth.

Ebola was named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where it was first recognized in 1976 when an epidemic killed more than 270 people.

Since then, Ebola outbreaks have been reported from Gabon, Sudan and the Ivory Coast, with individual cases of infection reported in Britain, where a laboratory worker was infected by a contaminated needle in 1976, and in Liberia.

The most recent reported outbreak was in 1996 in Gabon, when 60 people were infected. About 75 percent of them died.

The virus has also been the basis for at least three Hollywood blockbuster movies, usually involving scores of extras dressed head to toe in sinister biological contamination clothing, an evil tyrant who threatens to expose the world to the virus and a hero doctor in a race against time for a cure.

The exact origin of the Ebola virus remains unknown, medical experts say.

It has some characteristics similar to the HIV virus that leads to AIDS, and some scientists also believe it may have made a species leap from animal to human at some stage.

But they do know how deadly it is.

"There are only a few facilities in the world secure enough to test and do research on Ebola," Kerstiens said. "Fortunately most outbreaks have been in remote areas and have been contained."

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