The World Health Organization (WHO) is conducting more research on the individual who appears to have had the latent virus in the body.
This would suggest that infections may persist once people recover and have the potential to start a future outbreak.
International researchers, including a team from the University of Conakry in Guinea, sequenced the genome of nine samples taken from infected people during the current outbreak and compared them with previous outbreak sequences to help identify the cause.
The results suggest that the latest outbreak “is the result of the resurgence of a strain that was previously circulating in the West African outbreak,” the authors wrote in their analysis.
“The similarities are large enough for us to declare that it is the same family of the virus,” says Dr Salam Gueye, director of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Cluster of the WHO Regional Office for Africa.
But Dr Alpha Keita, deputy director of the Guinea Research and Training Center for Infection (CERFIG) at the University of Conakry, who led the research, said his team has refrained from making hasty conclusions.
They decided to be extremely careful and continue sequencing additional samples to obtain more complete sequences that would provide a safer response, he added.
In a separate report on the work, Keita explained that the implications in terms of public health and safety of people, such as the risks of stigmatization, physical and verbal violence among former Ebola survivors, required this approach. .
Gueye said new investigations are now underway to see what exactly happened.
On February 14, Guinea’s Ministry of Health declared a new outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the country’s Nzérékoré region. On March 25, 18 cases were reported, including 14 confirmed cases and four probable ones. Nine people have died and 366 contacts are being tracked.
According to researchers, the latest outbreak began just 200 km from the epicenter of the previous epidemic.
A sexually transmitted virus?
The nurse was a father-in-law of the survivor’s partner, who is believed to have carried the virus for five years. Subsequently, the spouse died due to Ebola virus disease; the nurse soon developed the disease and is believed to have transmitted it to other people during the funeral. “That’s how the outbreak may have started,” Gueye said.
CERFIG teams then sequenced the nine samples of people who tested positive for Ebola, with the Makana variant identified in these samples.
It is possible that the virus is latent and subsequently sexually transmitted from one person to another or that the virus is present in the body and does not cause disease, but due to the mutation of the virus or the immunity of the host. caused a relapse, Gueye told CNN.
“We continue to do epidemiological and anthropological research in order to reinforce or exclude this hypothesis, but so far this is the strongest hypothesis we have,” Gueye said.
Wim Van Damme, a researcher and expert on infectious diseases at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, who did not participate in the research, warns that this method of transmission would be a very rare fact. “There are more than 10,000 Ebola survivors in West Africa, and this is the first case, after five years,” he said.
He added that while many people think the infection was probably a case of sexually transmitted disease. “This is not safe because the virus can remain present in other parts of the body (mainly in the central nervous system).” But he explains that it is also unknown how the virus from the nervous system would spread to another human being.
“We need to do complementary research and epidemiological research to determine what happened and have a strong hypothesis about it. There are many facts that have provided us with enough information for us to react,” Gueye told CNN.
WHO is collaborating with governments affected by West Africa and a working group has been formed. “The working group will go beyond epidemiology, bioinformatics and the laboratory to see what we can learn from this experience and translate it into the program,” Gueye said.
The risk of future outbreaks
“The fact is that we need to monitor these survivors for extended periods of time with frequent semen scans for the virus. We can also provide condoms for them,” Dr.
“The community needs continuing education. We are trying to reach out to the community through health workers they can trust,” Aragaw said, adding that the CDC in Africa continually provides psychological support to survivors and advises partners and the people in the community.
The WHO says it will strengthen surveillance, disease detection and disease responses in Ebola-affected countries.
“It will change the way we respond to Ebola and the way we prevent it. It is a disease that must be part of the surveillance system and needs the collaboration of the community, health workers, and also it should be a priority for health authorities, ”Gueye said.
Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a rare but serious and often fatal disease in humans. The virus usually spreads through direct contact with the blood, body fluids, or tissues of infected people or animals.
The 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa was the largest to date, spreading to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
A total of 28,646 suspicious cases were reported along with 11,323 deaths.