A person who survived the major Ebola an outbreak in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 may have taken the virus five years before it jumped to another person and caused the current outbreak in Guinea, according to a new analysis.
Scientists previously knew that the Ebola virus could hide in the bodies of survivors, especially in ‘privileged’ parts of the body where the Immune system less active, such as in the eyeballs or the testes, Live Science reported earlier. This means that the person may shed the virus for some time after recovering from the deadly infection; and in rare cases the person could pass it on to others. The longest time a person shed the Ebola virus was 500 days, according to STAT News.
But a new analysis suggests that the Ebola virus may not only hide longer than that, but that it may also have the ability to cause brand new outbreaks. To analyze the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, which has now infected 18 people and killed nine people, the Guinea Ministry of Health sent three samples of the current variant to the World Health Organization’s laboratory at the Pasteur de Dakar Institute in Senegal. send.
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There, researchers evaluated the samples to determine the exact genes that make up the genome, and then compared them to previous Ebola virus variants. They found that the current variant is very similar to the “Makona variant” of 2014 that caused the West Africa outbreak in 2014 to 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 are ‘much less than would be expected during sustained human-to-human transmission’, the researchers wrote in the analysis. published on the discussion forum virological.org on Friday (March 12) and not yet peer-reviewed.
If the virus had been quietly spread from person to person since the outbreak of West Africa, it would probably have developed more than 100 different mutations in the last five years. On the contrary, it is likely that this virus stayed in the body of someone who was infected during the previous outbreak five years ago and jumped it to another person, such as through sexual transmission, which according to the analysis caused the current outbreak .
According to STAT, the virus can linger in the pockets around the body and can be infected on rare occasions. Such transmission usually 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 confused. More research is needed to bother exactly what happened, according to Science Magazine. The first known case of the current outbreak in Guinea was a nurse who was infected and died in January, but it is also possible that the nurse was infected after caring for her sick mother, according to STAT News; a few people became infected afterwards after attending the funeral.
Prior to this analysis, scientists assumed that new Ebola outbreaks were mostly caused by the virus that spreads from animal species to humans, according to Science. Although it is possible that this could have happened in Guinea, it is ‘incredibly unlikely’ given that the new virus samples and those of the previous West African outbreak are genetically so similar, said one of the researchers Stephan Günther of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine told Science. .
The findings also raise the question of whether survivors, rather than infected animals, could have provoked other outbreaks in Africa. according to The New York Times. Many survivors not only struggle with the long-term consequences of being infected with a deadly virus, but are also stigmatized, according to Science Magazine.
The possibility that Ebola has recovered from a survivor after five years’ opens up new challenges for survivors, their families and their communities, but also for the health system that needs to create ways to work with communities, known and unknown survivors, without further ado to create stigma. , “the researchers wrote in another post about virological.org.
If survivors with persistent viruses in their bodies can cause new outbreaks, much of Africa’s equatorial vaccination against Ebola could be vaccinated, even if there is no outbreak, Drs. William Schaffner, an expert in infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, told the Times. There are currently approved vaccines against Ebola, but they are only used when facing a region, according to the Times.
Originally published on Live Science.