The Ebola virus could hide in some survivors and reactivate even five years later, an analysis on the outbreak detected this year in Guinea confirmed today, until then free of the disease since 2016.
The risk of reappearance of the Ebola disease is greater than ever, the recent research led by the Guinean doctor Alpha Kabinet Keita says. The infection forces to redesign the strategy against infection, an article in the journal Nature specified.
In her efforts to investigate the origin of the latest outbreak in the Guinean city of Gouecke, the Spanish anthropologist Almudena Mari Saez, from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, has found that a 51-year-old woman midwife at the local health centre is a zero patient. The woman was hospitalized on January 21 with headache, nausea, among other symptoms.
Doctors did not suspect the virus and diagnosed malaria and salmonellosis, but the patient died days later and also relatives who cared for her. Thus, her mother and three siblings later killed 20 of his distant relatives and the possibility of having contracted the disease in his health centre.
The scientists warned about the need for an extensive vaccination campaign to prevent it from circulating again in areas where there was a very active transmission.
According to the World Health Organization, the virus Ebola had the two largest in history outbreaks. The medical experts have registered them in the last decade in West Africa and Conakry, where the pathogen left a balance of 13 thousand deaths and 18 thousand survivors.
