A person who survived the great Ebola The outbreak in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 may have harbored the virus for five years before it spread to someone else and triggered the current outbreak in Guinea, according to a new analysis.
Scientists already knew that the Ebola virus could hide in the bodies of survivors, especially in “privileged” areas of the body where the immune system is less active, like in the eyes or testicles, Live Science previously reported. This means that the person can spread the virus for some time after recovering from the deadly infection; and on rare occasions, that person can pass it on to other people. The longest time a person can spread the Ebola virus was 500 days, according to STAT News.
But a new analysis suggests that the Ebola virus can not only hide for much longer than that, but it may also have the ability to trigger new outbreaks. To analyze the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, which has already infected 18 people and killed nine, Guinea’s Ministry of Health sent three samples of the current variant to the World Health Organization laboratory at the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal.
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There, the researchers sequenced the samples to discover the exact genes that make up their genome and then compared that with previous variants of the Ebola virus. They found that the current variant is very similar to the 2014 “Makona variant” that caused the outbreak in West Africa in 2014-2016 and killed more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In fact, the new variant had only about a dozen genetic differences, which is “much less than would be expected during sustained human-to-human transmission,” the researchers wrote in the analysis. published on the virological.org discussion forum on Friday (March 12) and not yet peer reviewed.
If the virus had been transmitted silently from person to person since the West Africa outbreak, it probably would have evolved more than 100 different mutations in the past five years, according to the report. Instead, it is likely that this virus remained in the body of someone who was infected during the previous outbreak five years ago and passed on to another person, for example, through sexual transmission, leading to the current outbreak, according to the analysis.
The virus can remain in pouches around the body and infect others on rare occasions, according to STAT. This transmission typically occurs when a male survivor infects a woman through sexual contact, according to STAT.
But in the case of this new outbreak, the story is still confusing. More research is needed to find out exactly what happened, according to the journal Science. The first known case of the current outbreak in Guinea was a nurse who was infected and died in January, although it is also possible that the nurse was infected after caring for her sick mother, according to STAT News; some people were infected after attending the funeral.
Before this analysis, scientists assumed that the new Ebola outbreaks were caused mainly by the virus that jumped from animal species to humans, according to Science. While it is possible that this may have happened in Guinea, it is “incredibly unlikely”, given that the new virus samples and those from the previous West African outbreak are so genetically similar, one of the researchers Stephan Günther of the Bernhard Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine.
The findings also raise the question of whether survivors, rather than infected animals, could have triggered other outbreaks in Africa, according to The New York Times. Many survivors not only struggle with the long-term effects of being infected with a deadly virus, but also face stigmatization, according to Science Magazine.
The possibility that Ebola has resurfaced after five years of surviving “opens new challenges for survivors, their families and their communities, but also for the health system that must create ways of working with communities, known and unknown survivors, without create more stigmatization “, wrote the researchers in another post on virological.org.
If in fact survivors with viruses remaining on their bodies can cause new outbreaks, vaccinating “much of equatorial Africa” against Ebola, even when there is no outbreak, may be the solution, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist from Vanderbilt University, he told the Times. Currently, there are approved vaccines against Ebola, but they are used only when a region is experiencing an outbreak, according to the Times.
Originally published on Live Science.