Royal Free Hospital in London revealed on Wednesday that a nurse from Scotland who had recovered from deadly Ebola disease months ago is back in hospital, and this time, she is critically ill.
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Doctors expressed alarm at the development, reflecting that it shows how little is really known about the virus. But fortunately, unlike the testes, this hiding place does not seem to be letting the virus escape.
The report in the New England Journal of Medicine found two-thirds of men had Ebola in their semen after six months, and a quarter after nine.
All of the men who were tested in the first three months after becoming ill were positive for Ebola virus. Seven to nine months later, 26 percent, or 11 out of 43 men, tested positive for the Ebola virus. However, there are still many patients who are undergoing regular testing to make sure there is no recurrence of the virus in their bodies. A woman in Liberia may have been infected after she had unprotected sex with a male Ebola survivor, the study states; the survivor had been infected six months prior. In the meantime, health officials have urged the more than 8,000 male Ebola survivors to abstain from sex or use condoms until no remnants of the virus remain in their semen.
“Ebola survivors face an increasing number of recognized health complications”, said CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden.
“It may be that the survivors are compliant with the recommendations or maybe they are too exhausted to have sex”. “If they are then treated as pariahs and threats, we add a bad unkindness on top of their suffering”. She had been treating patients in Sierra Leone as part of a NHS volunteer team dispatched by Save the Children.
“Past outbreaks have not been reignited by survivors, but numbers have been small, and no sexual transmission was recorded prior to the current outbreaks”.
Almost all the victims have been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, although this is the second consecutive week with no confirmed cases. “People have a right to know it to protect themselves and their sexual partners”.
Scientists often test for diseases by sequencing genes from a sample – usually DNA, which encodes genetic information, or its cousin RNA, which controls how the genes express themselves.
She’d half jokingly told me that a few of the after effects she’d been experiencing – joint pains, thyroid problems – were down to being “a bit older” than the other two British Ebola survivors, who hadn’t reported such significant problems.
“We now have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to learn as much as we can about what happens to Ebola survivors”, says Dan Bausch of Tulane University in New Orleans, who is working on Ebola with the World Health Organization in Geneva.
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“The way we prepare for, and respond to, future outbreaks of Ebola and other infectious diseases needs to be strengthened”, Study co-author and LSHTM Professor John Edmunds said.
