ViroBlogy

I have already done a partial retrospective on having been reporting on Ebola haemorrhagic fever viruses for just over 20 years – but I totally forgot to commemorate that I have been producing Web pages for just over 21! So I’m going to go on a nostalgic ramble through the past, mainly using Ebola as the vehicle, and highlighting some of the history of virology along the way.

By the way, I HAVE to commend the Wayback Machine here: I have also previously bemoaned the fact that Web pages are NEVER preserved by their creators at regular intervals – but this is exactly what they do.  From 1997 onwards in the case of the whole of the University of Cape Town’s site and mine as part of that – and how interesting it has been to go back and look at what I thought was cool then!  But actually, what’s not to like? I mean, there’s hepatitis G, Congo fever, smallpox, Ebola, “equine morbillivirus” (aka Hendra virus) – and life on Mars. Or not B-)

What’s interesting, though, is that they have preserved almost all of my Ebola news pages – dating from May 1995, from right near the onset of the Kikwit Ebola epidemic.  There’s all sorts of interesting stuff there – though with some holes, caused by Lost Pages – ranging from a discussion of the possibility of finding Ebola in cotton plants [not!], with my old friend Murilo Zerbini, to a thread on “Candidate for the Ebola Reservoir Organism” from the late lamented bionet.virology discussion group, to whether Ebola Reston was airborne (probably not).

Great historical stuff, right there – and thank deities it is preserved via Wayback, because our upcoming Web renewal project here at UCT will kill ALL links from our Departmental site.  Get it while you can!

And while we’re at it: here’s a useful list of all Ebola-related posts on ViroBlogy since 2011.  Note when the first mention of plant-made antibodies to Ebola virus was….

Ebola: “We Could Have Stopped This”

8 September, 2014

This entry was posted on 21 July, 2015 at 14:22 and is filed under biotechnology, Ebola, Ebola, Evolution, General Virology, history, Vaccines: General, Viruses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.