I've at times wondered why Ebola hasn't been weaponized. Rather like slow motion suicide bombing. If you're healthy, you have a few days of decent fitness, while shedding virus. It'd be hard, psychologically. But consider the 9/11 attackers. They worked for months, preparing to suicide.
It is pretty usual for viral infections to have a range of effects with only a small percent (~15% in the case of measles I believe) of people getting sick enough to report it. I don't know what that number is for ebola but it always seemed to me the initial estimates of its virulance were going to be high. I mean, nobody was going to go reporting flu like symptoms in an african village to the CDC.
The question occurred to me when I heard about the epidemiology of Ebola in pre-Spanish South America. Supposedly (haven't verified) the disease incubated in wild animals, and occasionally crossed over into human populations. What limited an epidemic was that travel was slow and rare enough that the disease would spread and debilitate a single settlement before anyone could transfer it too far. (Obviously late-stage patients don't do a lot of traveling.)
So the question becomes why this hasn't changed with increased access to travel. Quarantine measures and sensible behavior appear to be the answer for inadvertent spread, but what's stopped malicious transfer? Is it just too hard to find and contract before quarantine goes into place? Is it tactically or psychologically unappealing for the groups willing to use other suicide tactics?
I have no clue. I gather that isolation and travel limitations kept HIV isolated for at least decades, and maybe centuries or more. But HIV takes a long time to debilitate, so there's plenty of opportunity to infect others. While Ebola incapacitates much faster than HIV, it's also much more contagious. And it does decimate affected communities rather quickly, arguably faster than HIV does.
I mean, consider that doctor who realized that he'd been infected. He freaked, and fled to South Africa for treatment. He survived, but a nurse who treated him died. What if she had been slow to show symptoms, and had infected family and friends? What if she had a side business as a prostitute?
Anyway, enough of that. Now I'm reminded of Ebola Syndrome aka Yi boh lai beng duk (伊波拉病毒). It's a rather gross Hong Kong horror film. But like the Living Dead films, it's very funny at times.
