Ebola virus - epidemiology, diagnosis, and control: threat to humans, lessons learnt, and preparedness plans - an update on its 40 year's journey

Ebola virus (EBOV) is an extremely contagious pathogen and causes lethal hemorrhagic fever disease in man and animals. The recently occurred Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks in the West African countries have categorized it as an international health concern. For the virus maintenance and transmission, the non-human primates and reservoir hosts like fruit bats have played a vital role. For curbing the disease timely, we need effective therapeutics/prophylactics, however, in the absence of any approved vaccine, timely diagnosis and monitoring of EBOV remains of utmost importance. The technologically advanced vaccines like a viral-vectored vaccine, DNA vaccine and virus-like particles are underway for testing against EBOV. In the absence of any effective control measure, the adaptation of high standards of biosecurity measures, strict sanitary and hygienic practices, strengthening of surveillance and monitoring systems, imposing appropriate quarantine checks and vigilance on trade, transport, and movement of visitors from EVD endemic countries remains the answer of choice for tackling the EBOV spread. Herein, we converse with the current scenario of EBOV giving due emphasis on animal and veterinary perspectives along with advances in diagnosis and control strategies to be adopted, lessons learned from the recent outbreaks and the global preparedness plans. To retrieve the evolutionary information, we have analyzed a total of 56 genome sequences of various EBOV species submitted between 1976 and 2016 in public databases.