How do you know if you have Ebola?
How do you catch Ebola?
Why is this outbreak more serious than other outbreaks?
How can this outbreak be stopped?
What can the rest of the world do to help stop the spread of Ebola?
These are the questions Dr Sanjay Gupta explains in this CNN video clip.
Self-study activity:
Before watching the video clip, go over the questions above and check what you really know about Ebola right now.
Then, watch the video and see the way Dr Sanjay Gupta answers the questions about Ebola. You can check the answers with the transcript below. The activity is suitable for intermediate students.
How do you know if you have Ebola?
Ebola can start off very vague. You might have a headache, you might have fever. People often develop some redness in the eyes, some rashes. Ultimately it starts to get progressively more severe. They may have abdominal pain, they may start to feel really tired, unable to even get up out of bed. That’s one of the signs that really raises people’s suspicions.
Many times they have what is known as a clotting disorder, where they start to bleed because their blood is not clotting. They way they you end up knowing for sure is doing a blood test. This is happening in many places right now in West Africa.
The thing with Ebola is you might feel symptoms very quickly, within a day or it could take up to three weeks. We do know people who were fine early in the morning and by the end of the day they were dead.
How do you catch Ebola?
Ebola likely came from some wild animal and after all these years they’re still not sure which, although they suspect it came from food bats. Once it infects human beings, and human beings can start to spread it from person to person. And that’s not transmitted through the air, not something we breathe in like the flu, but it’s something that can be in a small amount of body fluid and if that is contaminated with the Ebola virus, then it can infect other people.
Why is this outbreak more serious than other outbreaks?
It could be that people travel more than they used to. When they go to capital cities with big airports, there’s a lot of people in those places. It could also be that there is a distrust or at least some mistrust of a lot of the medical establishment, so people may be less likely to go get care, less likely to admit that they have symptoms, and less likely to get diagnosed as a result, until it’s too late so. I think there’s a lot of things that play here, but we live in a globalised world, where these infectious diseases can spread more rapidly than ever before.
How can this outbreak be stopped?
We know that when somebody starts to become sick any, even miniscule microscopic amount of body fluid from that person could infect other people. This just got to be a no-tolerance policy with regard to that. You have stories of family members cleaning the body even after a love one has died and getting infected that way. Those types of things have to absolutely be stopped, and that’s part of education campaigns, not only by these doctors who going, doctors without borders, but also the local doctors in these areas, who are sometimes much more trusted.
What can the rest of the world do to help stop the spread of Ebola?
As far as the rest of the world goes, they, they, within airports and in other places of travel, they implement policies where they check people’s temperatures, ask them questions before they get on a plane to try and reduce the risk of someone with Ebola gets on an international flight, but that’s almost impossible to make ironclad. It is likely we’re going to see people with Ebola travel to all sorts of parts of the world, including the United States. That will likely happen in the world in which we live, but it is a question of making sure it doesn’t continue to spread after that.
