Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Friday edition of the Nature podcast. Now, normally this would be the briefing chat show, but we're changing things up again this week. There is currently an outbreak of Ebola, centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has been declared a public health emergency by the

WHO. It's been caused by the rare Bundibujo species of Ebola virus, and researchers and public

health professionals are scrambling to get on top of it. At time of recording, the outbreak has been

linked to around 140 deaths and around 600 suspected cases, numbers that are likely to rise

in the coming days. To get the background on this outbreak and the efforts to tackle it, I'm joined

by Rachel Fieldhouse, one of the team here at Nature covering this evolving story. Rachel, thanks

for being here. No, thank you for having me. So let's talk about what Ebola is, because hearing that

name can elicit a lot of responses that are not necessarily grounded in reality. Now, clearly,

this is a very serious infectious disease and one that's caused by a group of viruses.

That's right. So there's four of these orthobola viruses that can cause

infections in humans. Some of the general symptoms, they start off quite non-specific. So people

present with fever, body pain, weakness, vomiting. So very flu-like. That's part of the issue

when it comes to identifying someone

with Ebola virus, but then also some of the more serious symptoms include things like

significant bleeding, and the Ebola virus is generally spread person to person through

contact with bodily fluids like blood, saliva, and also we can have transmission

on contaminated surfaces, and that's why we sometimes see spread in healthcare settings.

And so with this Bundy-Bujo species in particular, it can generally have a mortality rate

of about 25 to 50%, that's based off some previous outbreaks, that there's been two,

one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and another in Uganda.

And this is perhaps what makes this current outbreak so unusual. As you say, this is just the

third outbreak on record involving the Bundy Bujo species. Most other outbreaks have been caused by what's known as the Zaire species.

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