* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Reporter Peter Apps contrasts the Ebola crisis with the Marburg outbreak he covered in Angola
One of the most shocking things about the Ebola outbreak sweeping West Africa isn't its scale or the horror of its symptoms. It's that it has not happened before.
Nine years ago as a young reporter sent to Africa for Reuters, I found myself at the heart of another outbreak. The Marburg virus, a close cousin of Ebola, was on the loose in northern Angola. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
It was much smaller than the humanitarian disaster unfolding today and never spread as far. In the final analysis, the death toll was put at 227. At one stage, it was believed to be almost 100 more but some cases were later judged misdiagnosed. Of all those known to be infected, somewhere in the region of 90 percent died.
Still, in many ways it was a microcosm of the current crisis. The initial spread was missed by local, national and international doctors alike. Then it overwhelmed local health services, killing many health staff.
Locals reacted with fear, abandoned the hospital and tried to care for relatives at home, often with the help of traditional healers.
With a virus transmitted through blood, sweat and other bodily fluids, this guaranteed further infection. The majority of the initial sick were children. Within weeks of their deaths, their mothers and the traditional healers who had tried to help them were dying too.
The international health response was, frankly, relatively swift and heroic. Medecins Sans Frontieres ran an isolation ward, the World Health Organization (WHO) a lab and social outreach programme. Using tracks, tannoys, outreach workers and even the "Marburg Song", they warned people of the dangers of looking after and not reporting the sick. In the space of a couple of months, transmission stopped.
Crucially, the virus never seriously spread to the capital Luanda, although it did see a handful of cases. Had it done so, health experts had feared a catastrophe on the scale of that now unfolding in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In Angola maybe we were just lucky - the outbreak was the third most lethal of an Ebola-style filovirus up until the current crisis. As a rule, outbreaks have occurred in relatively isolated pockets of Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Still, how difficult would it have really been for those to spread to regional hubs like Kampala and Nairobi? It just didn't happen.
CHANGING BEHAVIOUR
For all the focus on the international institutional response, the main lesson I took away from my time in northern Angola was simple. Governments don't stop outbreaks like this, people do. And they do it through changing behaviour.
No one ever formally quarantined Uige, the northern Angola province and city of the same name where most of the cases took place. They didn't need to. Taxi, bus and truck operators from the rest of Angola essentially boycotted the place anyway. Only a couple of hundred kilometres from the capital but already hard to travel to after decades of war destroyed national infrastructure, it became almost unreachable.
Within the town itself, behaviour changed. Some of it was very minor. No more handshakes and hugs. Local children have what they call the "Marburg handshake", touching their shoes together rather than their hands.
There was discussion over closing the schools but with those kind of coping strategies, it never seemed needed.
Perhaps importantly, Marburg appeared to have a notably higher overall mortality rate than Ebola presently does. It also, I suspect, killed marginally faster. Most patients never made it to hospital but they spent less time able to infect others.
The quality of data, however, remains terrible. No one suggests WHO or the Angolan government ever really had an accurate tally of cases. Some of those who got sick and then survived never reported. And in a place like northern Angola, unexplained and brutally quick deaths from unknown natural causes were, I discovered, alarmingly common.
My team went out with WHO to test the body of a woman who had died quickly one night convulsing and vomiting. It turned out not to be Marburg and no one ever, as far as I can find out, was particularly concerned to find out what it was.
The most important and difficult behavioural change, though, was in the families of those who got sick.
Just before we left, we got word of the case WHO's anthropologists thought was crucial. In one of the villages, a pregnant woman had begun vomiting blood. Her husband had heard the medical advice. He knew what to do. He took the rest of the family outside. He closed the door, locked her in and called the authorities.
They took two days to come. By then she was dead but the family survived.
LESSONS FROM THE PLAGUE
As a rule, epidemics like this burn themselves out. In the great plague of London in 1665, after months and thousands of deaths, society changed beyond recognition. The rich fled. Everyone else stayed indoors. If they had plague in the family, that meant a cross on the door, a watchman outside and simply waiting to see if everyone died.
Much of the challenge then, as in Angola in 2005, was more logistical than medical, keeping the basic supplies of life running amid the outbreak. In Angola, that was the responsibility of the U.N. World Food Programme. In 1665, the Corporation of London kept food coming by paying more for corn. Outside London, villagers left vegetables in pre-arranged locations for collection. Prices were negotiated by shouting.
Bubonic plague - which we now know is spread by fleas on rats - is even easier to catch than a filovirus like Ebola. But the trick to avoiding it is much the same - make sure people keep their distance.
In Angola, the virus was at its height in April 2005 and all but gone by July. In London in 1665, data is also limited but infections are generally believed to have peaked in the September before falling off. Life was returning to normal by the time the Great Fire ravaged the city the following year.
The global health response under way in West Africa isn't pointless. Better health care will save lives, the sort of support being given by British troops in Sierra Leone - looking after local health workers who become sick - will help motivate the country's hospital staff to keep going amid the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
In the end, though, it will take ordinary people and society in general to beat this. If we can keep basic society functioning in West Africa and prevent people mingling and touching as much as possible, it will happen all the quicker.
In the meantime, of course, West Africa is finding itself quarantined whether global authorities want it or not. Air crews have refused to fly commercial jets there and on the ground itself, trucking and trading patterns will change.
It's probably too late to avoid a smattering of cases in the West. And when they occur, as we have seen in Texas and Spain, there will be new infections particularly among health staff. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people report to hospitals every day with feverish symptoms. They can't all be treated with barrier nursing as happens with full-blown Ebola.
Mistakes will happen. But like the population of Angola nine years ago or London in 1665, we will beat it eventually.
Peter Apps is global defence correspondent at Thomson Reuters. His account of his time in the 2005 Marburg outbreak Before Ebola: Dispatches from a Deadly Outbreak was published this month by Amazon Kindle Singles.
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