Ebola

Article

Ebola is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 22, 2021 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “containing an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria”; “There are also 7 other Ebola outbreaks”; “Liberia has been on the forefront of some recent pandemics, including Ebola”. It most often appears alongside COVID, FDA, Scott.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: December 22, 2021
  • Last seen: October 13, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

December 22, 2021 · Original source
I’m not saying doctors are generically cowards. My father is a doctor and he’s one of the bravest people I know. Every time there’s a typhoon or an earthquake in some terrorist-infested country on the other side of the world, he hops on a plane to go there and treat victims, sometimes before the rubble is even cold. If this was something simple, like treating river-blindness in war-torn parts of the Congo or containing an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria, I’m sure doctors would be all over it.
April 09, 2024 · Original source
2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak; almost 30k cases, no animal intermediate.
There are also 7 other Ebola outbreaks that match your criteria.
We've been studying Ebola for over 40 years and have yet to determine the animal reservoir. It took 20 years to identify the reservoir for HIV-1's progenitor. Sometimes finding the reservoir is easy, sometimes it's hard. Typically it is easy when you have lots of cases and the virus is not very efficient at human-to-human transmission, because that necessitates lots of separate zoonotic events, which necessitates lots of infected animals. For something that spreads fast (i.e., the kind of virus likely to start a pandemic), you don't need a big reservoir, so you have a smaller target. For example, we did find the reservoir for the 2009 flu pandemic, but it took 7 years: https://elifesciences.org/articles/16777
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Saeed Ahmad, $10K, to build an epidemic reporting system in Liberia. Liberia has been on the forefront of some recent pandemics, including Ebola and monkeypox. Saeed is currently based in Liberia, and wants to build infrastructure to translate local rumors about unusual diseases into reports to the national health authorities, including community reporters, phone hotlines, and social media.