Ebola and Influenza are two of the most deadly viral diseases; both diseases come from viruses that can have a detrimental effect to the human body. The modes of transmission and spread of the viruses are what make it most dangerous. According to the World Health Organisation (2012) Ebola has an extremely high fatality rate of 25 – 90% and Influenza kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people each year. Even though these two viral diseases share many similarities they differ on the type & structure of the virus itself as well as their modes of transmission and symptoms. Due to its extremely high fatality rate, Ebola is regarded as being the more lethal of the two.
Ebola virus disease is a viral disease “caused by a virus of the family, Filoviridae, …show more content…
The Ebola virus genetic material is “19 kb long, with seven open reading frames encoding structural proteins, this includes the virion envelope glycoprotein, nucleoprotein, matrix proteins VP24 and VP40, non-structural proteins VP30 and VP35; and the viral enzyme” (Sullivan et al., 2003). Conversely this is much different to the Influenza virus as the structure of the Influenza virus can often vary, but nevertheless the viral particles are typically “spherical or ovoid in shape and 80 to 120 nanometres in diameter” (Davidson, 2014) but sometimes very thinly spun forms of the virus can appear instead. The Influenza viral particle is an enveloped virus that originates its lipid bilayer from the plasma membrane of a host cell. Davidson (2014) states that approximately 80% of the bilayer is hemagglutinin, a trimetric protein that assists in the attachment of the virus to a host cell, the remaining 20% of the bilayer contains neuraminidase. Within the envelope is the Influenza genome, which is seperated into eight sections of single-stranded RNA in Influenza Type A & B, this is different to Influenza Type C which has only 7 pieces. “The RNA is packaged with nucleoprotein into a helical ribonucleoprotein form, with three polymerase peptides for each RNA segment” (Davidson, …show more content…
“Ebola is introduced into the human population through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals such as chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest” (World Health Organisation, 2014). Ebola can then spread through “human-to-human transmission via direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of those who are infected, and with inanimate surfaces contaminated with these fluids” (World Health Organisation, 2014). What is unknown to most of the population is that people remain infectious as long as their blood and body fluids contain the virus, this can be up to 7 weeks after recovering from the illness. However The Influenza Virus has four different possible modes of transmission being; direct contact, indirect contact, droplet and airborne transmission. Direct contact transmission occurs “when the transference of pathogen results from direct physical contact between an infected individual and a susceptible host” (Brankston et al., 2007). Indirect contact transmission is when the pathogen is transferred from