Guinea'S hollow tree Ebola's Ground Zero

Insect-eating bats that inhabited a hollow tree in a remote village in Guinea may have been the source of the world's biggest Ebola epidemic, scientists said yesterday.
More than 20,000 cases of Ebola, with at least 7,800 deaths, have been recorded by the World Health Organization (WHO) since a two-year-old boy died in the village of Meliandou in December 2013.
Reporting in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, scientists led by Fabian Leendertz at Berlin's Robert Koch Institute delved into the circumstances surrounding this first fatality.
The finger of suspicion points at insectivorous free-tailed bats -- Mops condylurus in Latin -- that lived in a hollow tree 50 metres (yards) from the boy's home, they said.
"The close proximity of a large colony of free-tailed bats... provided opportunity for infection. Children regularly caught and played with bats in this tree," the team said after an exhaustive four-week probe carried out in April.
The Ebola virus holes up in a natural haven, also called a reservoir, among wild animals which are not affected by it.
The virus can infect humans who come into contact with this source directly, or indirectly through contact with animals that have fallen sick from it. Highly contagious, the virus is then passed among humans through contact with body fluids.
Meanwhile, a volunteer nurse who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was airlifted from Scotland to a specialist clinic in London yesterday.
The woman, who has not been named and was diagnosed on Monday after returning from the region on Sunday, will be treated in an isolation ward in a hospital bed equipped with its own ventilation system. The patient, who is a British National Health Service nurse who was working for the charity Save the Children, was the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in Britain during the current outbreak.