Zika virus may be the day, but the results worrying about the latest outbreak that shook the world are continuing to emerge. At a meeting last night in Boston, researchers presented new evidence that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has had long-term effects on many survivors, including joint pain, neurological disorders and eye damage. They also found that many men harbor the virus RNA in sperm after they recover and far longer than imagined, suggesting that new outbreaks caused by sexual transmission are always a threat and that many people may well have had Ebola unknowingly.
disappointing results the scientists also presented a clinical trial of what was once considered the most promising treatment Ebola antibody cocktail called zmapp. The study began at the end of the epidemic, registered far fewer people than the researchers had expected, and it has failed to provide statistically significant results.
The details were revealed last night during a special session at the largest annual meeting of HIV / AIDS was held in North America, the Conference on Retroviruses and opportunistic infections. The results of Ebola were decidedly off-topic, but meeting organizers have decided to make room for them because of overlap in the research community about HIV and Ebola, and because of the magnitude of the epidemic .
Eugene Richardson, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, started the session with the data in an unusual study that helped the conduct in Sierra Leone. Working with health partners, a non-profit headquartered in Boston, researchers and Sierra Leone, Richardson went to a village hit hard a year after the last transmission occurred. He wanted to determine how many people may have been infected without ever being diagnosed.
During the epidemic, 34 villagers had a confirmed or probable cases of Ebola. Richardson and his colleagues visited their houses and tested blood from 207 people who had lived there, but are not known to have had Ebola. Fourteen of them had Ebola antibodies, indicating they had been infected.
Two of these people, it turned out, had had fever during the quarantine period, and the cases were suspected and whether Ebola teams had found. "We asked," Where were you when we came around the watch? ' "Said Richardson. "They said, 'Hiding in the bush." The other 12 people with antibodies reported no symptoms at all. This means that overall, 25% of 48 people from the village who were confirmed to have Ebola or have was deemed probable cases had no symptoms.
Although positive antibody tests do not prove that people were infected various diseases, can trigger the production of antibodies similar looking-other findings supported the suggestion that the Ebola virus infections can occur without any symptoms. in a presentation on two vaccines tested Ebola in Liberia, scientists reported that 6.3% of those who registered had antibodies Ebola before they received the experimental products. As Fatorma Bolay, director of the Liberia Institute for biomedical research, explained, these participants had "no knowledge of previous infection of the Ebola virus."
"It is certainly possible, if not probable, that there is an asymptomatic infection," said Nancy Sullivan, Ebola researcher at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ( NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, who co-chaired the session. small studies 15 years ago from an outbreak in Gabon have also reported high rates of asymptomatic infection.
the enormous scale of the epidemic of 2013-16, which has sickened more than 28,000 people and killed 11,316 has allowed investigators to collect the most accurate ever obtained evidence on the long-term damage Ebola, including his strange ability to persist in the body after the patient recovers. Jean-François Etard of the Institut de recherche pour le développement (INSERM) in Montpellier, France, described a study being of survivors that it leads with Guinean colleagues. to date, they examined 475 people whose blood was found on average clear the virus nearly 8 months earlier.
In clinical examinations, 83% of people reported at least one long-lasting symptom being joint or most common muscle pain, headache and fatigue. Eye examinations by specialists have shown abnormalities in about one in five patients and two children had gone blind from cataracts. The researchers obtained samples of sperm from 107 men; 6% tested positive for Ebola RNA viruses. The team found viral RNA in the sperm later than 9 months after a man had been discharged from an Ebola center.
A second study provided more details on how long the Ebola virus can remain present in semen. INSERM researcher Daouda Sissoko studied 26 men in Guinea who provided samples several times; 55 days after the onset of the disease, 73% had still Ebola RNA in their semen, and 246-day more than 8 months after getting better 27% were still positive. A man is positive to 334 days. More disappointing still, another study in 97 men in Liberia reported that the sperm of a man tested positive 18 months after his recovery, and three had Ebola-positive sperm after two previous samples have tested negative.
testing RNA positive do not mean a person is contagious; it is possible that the virus is viable or is present in minute quantities such that it is no longer a threat. However, sexual transmission of survivors considered clear of the virus have been documented, and the World Health Organization urged men who have recovered from Ebola to use condoms for at least 12 months after recovering from illness or until they have two negative RNA tests for the virus in their semen. "A single sexual transmission could restart the transmission chain," said Etard.
final presenter of the session, unveiled the highly anticipated results of a multicountry study of zmapp the frontrunning after experimental treatment saved monkeys from Ebola enormous five days after infection has occurred. Richard Davey NIAID, which co-led the study, said the trial, which enrolled patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone , Guinea and the United States had hoped to enroll 0 people. They would be receiving "optimized standard of care" -the group or control the intervention over three intravenous infusions of zmapp spaced 3 days apart. Ultimately, the waning epidemic forced the team to complete the study late last month after only 72 people registered.
zmapp contains three antibodies (color) that bind to different parts of the Ebola surface protein (gray).
Daniel Murin and Andrew Ward
One participant was "lost to" Davey said, and the remaining 71, 21 died: 37 % in the control group against 22% among those who received zmapp. "We must carefully choose its adjective," said Davey. "This is certainly suggestive of a trend in favor of containing arms zmapp." But the results are not statistically significant.
as Science reported last month in a special report , the enormous effort to test new drugs and vaccines in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia has produced a thin harvest a vaccine produced by Merck is the only product that has shown positive results unequivocally Many held out some hope that the study, which zmapp used a randomized controlled design, the gold standard in. clinics deliver another bit of good news trials.
Mapp Biopharmaceutical, San Diego, California, company zmapp factory, issued a press release yesterday, quoted its CEO, Kevin Whaley, saying the company will now "vigorously pursue the development and permit application zmapp as a treatment for Ebola."
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