Ebola virus disease (EVD) (or Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF)) is the name for the human disease which may be caused by any of four of the five known ebola viruses. These four viruses are: Bundibugyo virus (BDBV), Ebola virus (EBOV), Sudan virus (SUDV), and Taï Forest virus (TAFV, formerly and more commonly Côte d'Ivoire Ebolavirus (Ivory Coast Ebolavirus, CIEBOV)). EVD is a viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF), and is clinically nearly indistinguishable from Marburg virus disease (MVD).
The genera Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus were originally classified as the species of the now-obsolete Filovirus genus. In March 1998, the Vertebrate Virus Subcommittee proposed in the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) to change the Filovirus genus to the Filoviridae family with two specific genera: Ebola-like viruses and Marburg-like viruses. This proposal was implemented in Washington, D.C., as of April 2001 and in Paris as of July 2002. In 2000 another proposal was made in Washington, D.C., to change the "-like viruses" to "-virus" resulting in today's Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus.
In international relations, aid (also known as international aid, overseas aid, or foreign aid) is a voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another, given at least partly with the objective of benefiting the recipient country. It may have other functions as well: it may be given as a signal of diplomatic approval, or to strengthen a military ally, to reward a government for behaviour desired by the donor, to extend the donor's cultural influence, to provide infrastructure needed by the donor for resource extraction from the recipient country, or to gain other kinds of commercial access.Humanitarianism and altruism are, nevertheless, significant motivations for the giving of aid.
Aid may be given by individuals, private organisations, or governments. Standards delimiting exactly the kinds of transfers that count as aid vary. For example, aid figures may or may not include transfers for military use: to cite one instance, the United States included military assistance in its aid figure until 1957 but no longer does. The most widely used measure of aid, "Official Development Assistance" (ODA) is such a figure. It is compiled by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The United Nations, the World Bank, and many scholars use the DAC's ODA figure as their main aid figure because it is easily available and reasonably consistently calculated over time and between countries. The DAC consists of 22 of the wealthiest Western industrialised countries plus the EU; it is a forum in which they coordinate their aid policies.
Leonard George Horowitz DMD, MA, MPH (born June 20, 1952) is a former dentist, a health industry entrepreneur, and the author of a number of books, pamphlets, DVDs, CDs and articles on public health issues; the books and pamphlets have been published under his own Tetrahedron imprint. Horowitz is an AIDS conspiracy theorist and opposes vaccination.
From 1978 to the mid-1990s, Horowitz wrote several articles on dentistry, including its relation to medical marijuana and holistic health. Beginning in the early 1990s, AIDS hygiene in dentistry and addressing patient fears about AIDS risks in the dental office became dominant themes in Horowitz's peer-reviewed work.
Horowitz's self-published books include Deadly Innocence: Solving the Greatest Murder Mystery in the History of American Medicine (1994), in which he claims that Kimberly Bergalis' dentist, David J. Acer was a pedophile and a serial killer who used HIV as his murder weapon; and Emerging Viruses: Aids & Ebola — Nature, Accident or Intentional? (1996), which advances the theory that AIDS and Ebola were engineered by the U.S. government with biological warfare and genocide in mind.