On the question of Ebola.

I don't know much about Ebola, specifically, but I believe it is part of a
class of viruses that are different from a typical, run-of-the-mill virus.
So what I say next may not apply to Ebola.

In general, when you are infected with a virus in childhood, your body
recognizes the protein coat of the virus as a "foreign invader" and makes
anti-bodies against the virus.  Whether those anti-bodies last for the rest
of your life, making you forever-after immune to the disease, or only last
for a few years after the initial infection depends on the specific virus,
the level of initial infection, the level of anti-body response, etc.  For
example, young children who get a "mild" case of chicken pox will often get
a second case several years later, and only become completely immune after
the second case.  Remember too, that having anti-bodies doesn't prevent you
from contracting the infection again, it merely helps your body destroy the
virus before viral levels reach the stage where symptoms show.

To use the chicken pox example again, I had chicken pox as a 4 year old, and
never had "symptoms" again, but I undoubtedly have had the virus in my
system a number of times since then -- probably once with each child when
they got it, and probably other times as well.

My mother had the mumps when she was breastfeeding me as a 4 month old.  I
never had any symptoms, but I have never had the mumps as a recognizable
disease either.  So I probably had a mild case, enough viral load for my own
body to make anti-bodies and render me immune, but my mother's antibodies
through her breast milk also helped me at the initial infection, so that I
never had any symptoms.

Immunity to malaria (a protozoan parasite, not a virus) is a different type
of immunity.  It takes surviving repeated bouts of malaria for sufficient
immunity to build up so that older children and adults don't have terrible
symptoms (they still get malaria, they still have mild symptoms).  But once
they get to be elderly (60s and 70s), their immunity disappears, and malaria
kills both many infants and young children and many elderly people in areas
where malaria is present.

Catching a virus as an adult, for the first time, is a very different
situation from getting it as a child.  A person's immune system is much
stronger in early childhood than it is in adulthood, which is why it is so
much better to have the chicken pox, mumps, measles, malaria, etc. as a
child, rather than for the first time as an adult.

A mother's milk that had active antibodies to a disease should help whoever
drinks it fight off the disease -- but I doubt that a mother who survived
Ebola would be in any condition at all to make milk and provide it for
anyone.  Ebola is one of a group of viruses that cause one to hemorrhage out
of every part of one's body.

Kathy Dettwyler

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