Humanity is bound to face an unknown number of deadly new
viruses emerging out of Africa’s vast tropical rainforests, as per the
discoverer of Ebola, Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, stated a CNN
report.

“We are now in a world where new pathogens will come
out,” Tamfum is quoted as saying in the report, alleging that the same would
constitute the newest threat to humanity.

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The first blood samples of Ebola that Tamfum took in 1976 and which later
on were sent to the US and Belgium for analysis, were from patients and staff
from the Yambuku Mission Hospital situated in the northern part of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, with the-then unidentified pathogen taking to deathbed
88% of the patients and 80% of the staff working in the facility.

In Ingende, DRC, the fears of the emergence of a new virus
remains starkly active, after samples from a woman who recovered from a disease
with symptoms close to Ebola were tested in the national capital Kinshasa, brought
back negative results– even upon testing the samples for other diseases with
similar symptoms. The virus that infected her is statedly still unidentified.

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Reportedly, such zootonic diseases – those that make the
jump from animals to human beings – are results of ecological demolition and a
closer contact between human beings and comparatively smaller species that can
potentially act as vectors, carrying newer diseases to habitations that border
their own.

A 2017 study displayed 25 to 27 Ebola outbreaks in central
and western Africa along the edges of the rainforest, in places which had
notedly seen deforestation two years prior to the outbreaks.