The Dark Ages had the black plague, the Colonial Age had small pox, the Industrial Age had the Spanish flu, and in the Scientific Age, we face the Ebola virus.

Is an international outbreak in the near future?  Ebola started in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the mid ’70s, early ’80s. Now it has spread to west Africa — and the United States.

We all know the story. First it hit Texas when a man came back from Nigeria with signs of Ebola. He died about a week later. Ebola crisis over? Turns out a month after the panic, two people in New York were infected with the virus.

What exactly is Ebola? It came from a river in Central Africa. According to Mr. Pete Womack, a former microbiologist at the University of Louisville, Ebola is an RNA-class virus, which means that the genetic code can change. A DNA virus is stable and can replicate exact copies. RNA opposes exact copies.

An example of RNA viruses are influenza, as well as swine influenza. This explains why the flu cannot be cured. Every year there is a new strain of flu, different than the last. Does Ebola have the same ability? Not now, but it could develop in that direction. More importantly, the virus may be able to mutate and adapt to changes.

If Ebola goes global, it could speed up the incubation process, which today is 21 days. The strange thing about Ebola is at one point it went away from humans, meaning that the human infection rate went down for a few years.

During this period, Ebola infected animals — not just any animals, but great apes, mainly lowland gorillas. The virus depleted the lowland gorillas numbers, making them a lot more scarce. The illegal killing and consumption of bush meat has been identified as a cause of the virus spreading back to humans.

Womack posed a number of ways Ebola could go:

1. It could become less devastating. The virus could be like the flu and make you really sick. The symptoms would remain the same, but have a lower chance of killing you.
2. It could get much worse and become a global epidemic. Our society would be hard pressed to care for sickness at an epidemic level.

Trinity teacher Mr. Mike Budniak agreed with both possible scenarios, but said that scenario two is highly unlikely.

“The virus has a very thin protein coat, which can be broken easily,” Budniak said. “But if the virus mutates, it could go airborne, which would be catastrophic.”

Womack said, “It’s possible but unlikely that it could go airborne because of its thin protein coat.”

On a viral scale, Ebola has killed a relatively small number of people in the couple of decades it has been around. As a human race, can we solve this problem, or is this Mother Nature’s call of natural selection? History tells us the problem will be solved.  Curing Ebola is not the only issue, however.  There’s another elephant in the room. History also tells us that every country has had problems with racism. Even today, in our country, we see the events in Ferguson, among other places.

In Africa, Ebola has been raging since 1979 with a million lives lost. Why? Because our government, as well as others, has not acted on Ebola. The United Nations has been doing all it can to help West Africa, but in the end, they were waiting for us. During the summer Africa cried for help and no one answered.

By Autumn, when everything took a turn for the worst, the estimates of death increased and American alarm bells rang. Yet, we cannot contain it. Why did we wait? Some say it’s a racial issue, and some say it’s because Ebola did not get enough attention. It was both.

In the end, if Womack’s second Ebola scenerio happens, it would be a situation summed up well by Budniak: “If we brought this on ourselves, I call that irony.”