Guinea’s Ebola outbreak started with patient infected 7 years ago- study

The recent Ebola outbreak in Guinea may have been triggered by a case where a patient harboured the virus for five years unknowingly only for the disease to show up later, a study has revealed.

GAVI, a vaccine-oriented organisation, published an article on March 17, explaining how scientists who conducted genome sequencing on patients revealed the hibernation of the virus.

According to the article, scientists conducted genome sequencing to compare the virus in patients in the 2021 outbreak against the ones in 2014-2016 periods which devastated West Africa.

It partly read: ‘‘The discovery, which is based on a comparison of viral genome sequences from patients infected in the current outbreak and the 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic, suggests the virus may be able to survive in the bodies of survivors for four to five times longer than previously thought.’’

The study made the conclusion that the virus that sent fear in West Africa recently was the same as the one detected in five to seven years ago. The study says that normally, the patterns of genetic sequencing change when the virus moves from host to host. And, in more than five years, a huge margin of change was expected but this did not happen.

‘‘This strongly suggests that the virus currently circulating in southern Guinea is closely related to strains that were behind the previous epidemic,’’ GAVI states.

GAVI says researchers have ascertained that the Ebola virus ‘lingers in certain body tissues that the immune system pays less attention to, including the eyeballs and testes, in some survivors.’ But what puzzled them was how it would stay in the body for such a long time-a question that they tended to answer. 

They say the virus can be dormant till it is triggered to activity. The disease also spreads through sexual intercourse. Initially, the researchers had ascertained that the virus could live in in the human body for 500 days without detection.

Ebola, which killed atleast eight people in Guinea early this year, started in  Gouécké, southern Guinea, when a nurse was found with the virus on January 18.

It was after this that a team of researchers started tracing the genesis of the infection and possible mutation of the virus.