Viral hemorrhagic fevers are spread by a variety of viruses and are mostly untreatable. They affect many organs and damage blood vessels, sometimes causing internal and external bleeding.
Infections often cause fever, weakness, soreness, and headache, often followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, organ failure, and bleeding.
These diseases regularly emerge from the wild, as Ebola did again just recently. They can be extremely deadly — in past Ebola outbreaks, fatality rates ranged between 25% to 90%, with an average of about 50%.
Hemorrhagic fevers feature on both the CDC's list of biological agents that could pose a national security threat and on the WHO's list of diseases that can cause a public health emergency, and for good reason.
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa infected more than 28,600 people and killed more than 11,300. Such outbreaks can also cause public terror. Experts widely agree that the world needs to develop better ways to contain diseases like this. In the case of Ebola, researchers are testing an experimental vaccine to see if it can help stop the current outbreak.
If a strain of this type of disease were to mutate or be modified to become more contagious, that could cause worldwide devastation.