Officials in Senegal say that the country’s only confirmed Ebola patient has recovered from the disease and is resting until he returns home to Guinea.  Authorities are monitoring 67 people who had some sort of contact with the man, but there appear to be no further infections in Senegal.

But doctors say the 21-year old male student is suffering psychologically because he lost several relatives back home to Ebola.  Guinea, Sierra Leone, and especially Liberia are having a very hard time with the killer virus.  Nigeria has had some fatalities, too, and the regional death toll is almost 2,300 lives lost out of some 4,300 patients.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) is warning of an “exponential” spread in Liberia.  Officials have warned than Ebola could touch 20,000 people, but other predictions are much more grim.

“If the epidemic in Liberia were to continue in this way until the 1st of December, the cumulative number of cases would exceed 100,000,” Dr. Christian Althaus of the University of Bern told Science magazine, acknowledging that long-tern predictions like this are subject to error.

Oxford University looked at what’s believed to be the source of Ebola, the several species of Fruit Bats that are believed – though not confirmed – to carry the virus.  Researchers tracked the dense forest range of the flying creatures and came up with a map that suggests 22 countries are at risk of Ebola (page 45 of the pdf on that link).  The bats can infect monkeys and rats, and all three are sometimes consumed as “bush meat” in several countries.  Cooked meat is unlikely to transmit the virus, but handling raw bush meat in preparation of cooking could expose people to the Ebola virus.