Ebola in the ancient world

What if the Ebola virus occured in antiquity? say, 1 A.D.

Africa becomes depopulated and if it reaches the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade, everyone dies. India and China have a good chance of becoming a horror show. Green Antarctica levels of grim.
 
It probably burns itself out, without modern sanitation pretty much everyone in whatever group it first appeared in would get it, and those who survive would be immune. The disease would have nowhere to go and that would probably be it. I am definitely not an epidemiologist though, so take this with a grain of salt.
 

atheismo

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We don't actually know that Ebola wasn't around in ancient times. It's possible that small burshfire ebola epidemics have been happening for a lot longer than we suspect. Given the nature of the virus, which will tend to burn itself out, any ancient epidemics are likely locally devastating and globally insignificant.
 
True that ebola would have stopped quickly. The disease kills pretty quickly and people didn't travel very far and speciality not fastly. When ebola would have killed all people some area the disease hasn't place where to go when all people have died or escaped.
 
Ebola is surprisingly less contagious than you give it credit for. Measles, for example, is 9x more contagious (measles is one of the most contagious known diseases), and several other common diseases were more contagious. That coupled with the fact that the high mortality rate means that it would probably occur in localized outbreaks and people would eventually figure out that you should leave someone with ebola alone.

This is over time, of course. At first it could wipe out large populatioms in Africa and wherever it spread.
 
True that ebola would have stopped quickly. The disease kills pretty quickly and people didn't travel very far and speciality not fastly. When ebola would have killed all people some area the disease hasn't place where to go when all people have died or escaped.

What if it starts in say, Carthage? or Byzantium?
 
Actually there are serious theories, that one of the ancient plagues was not the bubonic plague but ebola. The symptoms described in ancient texts are pretty similar.
 
Some people die. The rest of the population learns to avoid people bleeding from every orifice. Every few decades an outbreak will spring up. Rinse, repeat. Basically.

Ebola hits too hard and kills too fast to be a true plague. Ebola fails at being an efficient virus, that's why it is so deadly. An effective virus is the virus that keeps the host alive for the longest amount of time with the least amount of symptons and side effects.

The flu. That's an efficient virus. It stays in people's systems for a long time. It is very contagious when no symptoms are being shown. It kills, but rarely. The flu will be around forever. Something like Ebola will come and go.
 
Ebola can't get out of Africa before the modern era. Even presuming in the early modern era that someone infected with ebola became enslaved, they'd probably infect and kill all of the cargo (and probably all of the crew) before reaching the New World, since even under the best conditions it took six weeks to cross the Atlantic.
 
Something like Ebola will come and go.

And indeed, similar diseases (in terms of their mortality rates) have appeared and vanished in the past, such as the English sweating sickness:

Sweating sickness, also known as "English sweating sickness" or "English sweate" was a mysterious and highly virulent disease that struck England, and later continental Europe, in a series of epidemics beginning in 1485. The last outbreak occurred in 1551, after which the disease apparently vanished. The onset of symptoms was dramatic and sudden, with death often occurring within hours.
 
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