Packs of wild dogs spread Ebola after eating corpses
The ever-evolving Ebola narrative is broaching into ludicrous territory, with reports now claiming that wild dogs are going around digging up the rotting remains of deceased victims and eating their flesh in the streets. Special Ebola graveyards, where the dead are being buried in haste and at shallow depths, are reportedly feasting grounds for these dogs, which officials say are capable of spreading the disease to humans.
The Daily Mail says Liberian villagers first came across the dogs while going about their daily routines. Right in the middle of busy streets, they said, hungry hounds were allegedly seen ripping through rotting corpses, to the shock of onlookers. After determining the source of the bodies, it was revealed that shallow graves were to blame.
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Stephen Korsman of the Division of Medical Virology at UCT just alerted me to this article, in some distress because they had misquoted him and used his comments out of context. This is a rather wild, sensationalist and highly inaccurate piece from a fringe web site that seems to have blocked me from commenting, because of previous criticism. So, I'll just do it here.
They comment: "Logically speaking, it makes little sense that asymptomatic dogs are possible Ebola carriers while asymptomatic humans are not. There exists no credible science to substantiate this apparent inconsistency beyond the baseless claims made by government health officials."
Utter garbage: bats carry Nipah virus, SARS-CoV, Ebola, Marburg AND rabies essentially asymptomatically - and can transmit ALL of them to other mammals. So too can deer mice transmit Sin Nombre hantavirus in the south-western USA without showing symptoms. Rodents transmit Lassa fever virus in West Africa every year, again without being symptomatic. Mice can transmit various South American haemorrhagic fever viruses without obviously being sick. I wish they would get their facts straight: this is is very easily checked!