ALLENTOWN, Pa. (WFMZ) — A local infectious disease specialist is keeping a close eye on the newest strain of the Ebola virus, as the suspected death toll and case numbers continue to rise in Africa.<\/p>\n
“The mortality of this virus is potentially extreme,” said Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, Infectious Disease Specialist at St. Luke’s University Health Network.<\/p>\n
The Ebola virus typically has a 25% to 90% mortality rate.<\/p>\n
While there haven’t been any cases in the United States, Dr. Jahre said Americans should absolutely be concerned.<\/p>\n
“Anything that occurs in any part of the world can become part of our world in less than 12 hours,” Jahre cautioned.<\/p>\n
Jahre said the virus started spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda about a month ago.<\/p>\n
“We’re getting to this fairly late on,” Jahre stated.<\/p>\n
Ebola virus typically has an incubation period of 2 to 21 days and is spread through contact with bodily fluids. Symptoms start off mild and flu-like with headache, fatigue, muscle aches and fever, before kicking it up a notch with severe diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding.<\/p>\n
There’s currently no treatment or vaccine for this new strain–called Bundibhgyo–and it takes time to test for.<\/p>\n
“Early identification and early supportive treatment is still very important,” Jahre said, which could decrease mortality rates to 20%.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization says there are more than 50 confirmed infections and nearly 600 suspected cases, with close to 140 deaths.<\/p>\n
“There are a number of treatments that are being investigated right now because it takes a while to figure this out. We know that this may take at the very least, months,” Jahre concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. (WFMZ) — A local infectious disease specialist is keeping a close eye on the newest strain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232,805],"class_list":["post-198271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area","tag-lehighvalley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}