EBOLA OUTBREAKS LINKED TO ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE

Outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus could be linked to environmental damage deep in the African forest, Zaire's leading virologist said Wednesday.

Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe told an international conference on Ebola in the Zairean capital Kinshasa outbreaks appeared to be linked to disturbances of the ecosystem."That is to say that in Gabon, gold prospectors went deep into the forest. They cut down trees in all directions, they dug up and destroyed a part of this environment. This gave rise to the emergence of the virus," he said.

He said the virus appeared to lie dormant in the forest, and logging or other disturbances seemed to activate it.

"In the case of Zaire, it was a charcoal-burner, a man who had a farm somewhere around Kikwit."

He said the first reported outbreak in Yambuku, in Zaire's Equatorial province in 1976, was also in a region of forest.

Muyembe, who traveled to Gabon in February to study the deaths of at least 13 people who developed Ebola after eating apes found dead in the bush, said he did not believe the virus lay dormant in apes between outbreaks.

"Apes are not the reservoir of the Ebola virus. Apes are as much the victims of the virus as men," he said.

An outbreak of Ebola in the Zairean town of Kikwit last May killed 244 people. As well as the Gabon outbreak, cases have been confirmed in Ivory Coast and Liberia.

The three-day conference organized by the World Health Organization heard calls for an international fund to be set up to fight against the epidemic.

"This fund would serve above all to support research, permit the exchange of information and facilitate rapid intervention by experts once an outbreak was declared," said Zaire's Health Minister Kasongo Numbi.

"We could share the costs of modern equipment. One kind of test could be carried out in one country and another in another country. One single country cannot bear the cost of all the modern equipment for analysis and treatment," he said.

Endemic diseases like malaria, cholera and meningitis routinely kill far more Africans than Ebola, but the virus attracts attention because of its high fatality rate - at least seven out of 10 victims die - and the mystery over where it lies dormant in between outbreaks.