The Ebola outbreak was no doubt encouraged by their increasingly urbanized and interconnected populations, especially among the high levels of poor who live in dense slums, but also from the dependence of the region on the foraging of "bush meats"--the term for local animals in surrounding rain forests on which many depends. Have we neglected to consider these animals as hosts from which Ebola "jumped" to humans, whose restricted regional habitat augmented the risk of a "spillover" of Ebola across species in these regions? Can we start to map the relation of bush meats to the virus' now-exponential spread across the continent, as well as merely tracking the huge numbers of people infected with the virus in individual nations? Continue reading ![]()
