Doctors said that Cafferkey suffers from late complications of her previous Ebola infection.
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Experts who believe Ebola can be sexually transmitted through infected semen cite the lone reported case of male-to-female transmission of the related Marburg virus during an outbreak in 1967, according to the WHO.
Researchers have documented one case of the sexual transmission of Ebola in Liberia, in mid-March. She then spent nearly a month recovering.
For survivors whose semen has not been tested, World Health Organization recommends that safe sex be practiced for at least six months after onset of the disease.
The explanation for why a few men retain fragments of the Ebola virus in their semen for months while others clear the virus also remains unclear.
The study consisted of 93 men over the age of 18 from Freetown, Sierra Leone, provided a semen sample which was tested to detect the presence of Ebola virus genetic material.
Bishop John Keenan of Paisley is calling for prayers for the Scottish nurse who is critically ill with late complications from the ebola virus.
“Survivors should be abstaining from sex or using condoms for a much longer period of time than they originally had been told”, Knust told NBC News. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick people, most commonly blood.
The 2014 Ebola epidemic, which impacted several countries in West Africa and even surfaced in the US, was the largest in history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it had been impossible to prove.
“We are sad to announce that Pauline Cafferkey’s condition has deteriorated and she is now critically ill”, read a statement from London’s Royal Free Hospital, where the 39-year-old has been in the high level isolation unit for almost a week. “I hope she makes a full and speedy recovery”, said Margaret Ferrier, Rutherglen and Cambuslang MP. The case report appears in the same issue of the journal.
Researchers don’t know why Ebola RNA persists in semen, or even if semen can spread the virus. It doesn’t cause any symptoms for the men.
“We don’t have a great understanding of what exactly is going on in the male reproductive tract”, Knust said. They’re protected from the immune system cells that normally destroy viruses.
He added: “The ones that we know about are in the testicles in men, the central nervous system – so that is around the brain and the spinal cord – and potentially the joint spaces, and in the chambers around your eye”. The other was U.S. doctor Ian Crozier, in whose eye doctors found Ebola virus months after he was discharged from a hospital in Atlanta where he had been treated for the disease he contracted in west Africa. She had been unable to use standard protective goggles because she could not get them to fit properly.
“The community has also rejected them in many different ways as well”.
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The findings, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are part of a long-term effort to decipher the mysteries that still surround the deadly disease.
