March 13 (UPI) – A survivor of the 2014-16 Ebola uprising is expected to have emerged in Guinea, a new report shows.
The survivor, harboring the virus from earlier onset, apparently transmitted the Ebola virus through semen to a sexual partner, according to researchers. Previously, 500 days was the maximum known lifespan.
Research was based on a genetic sequence of virus samples from normal behavior, a report published Friday at virological.org showed.
“He’s a stunner,” Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious disease specialist who was not involved in the research, told the New York Times. “This is an amazing thing.”
Symptoms of Ebola virus disease are rare and often fatal, with fever, abdominal pain, and unexplained hemorrhaging, swelling, or bruising among the symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was first found in 1976 near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and since then it has appeared from time to time, infecting people in several African countries.
Scientists believe the virus treats animals with bats or non-human primates as the most likely source, which also surprised the latest discovery.
A genetic study of four viruses from people affected by the routine Guinea uprising was close to viruses that humans introduced in 2014, according to the research published Friday. Lack of mutations suggested that the new revolution did not emerge from a bat or an inhuman primate, but was instead carried by a survivor of the 2014-16 West African Ebola revolution.
“With this news, I was really surprised,” Angela Rasmussen, a geologist with Georgetown University in Washington, DC told ScienceNews.
Health authorities in Guinea called the new Ebola uprising there last month after three people died.
The uprising in 2014-16 affected 28,652 people, including 11,325 people who died worldwide from the disease, with more than 11,000 cases in Guinea, and Liberia and Sierra Leone was nearby, according to the CDC.
The DRC confirmed a new case of Ebola the same month the authorities declared the individual revolution in Guinea, and about eight months after the last outbreak of the disease at the DRC.
The 2018 revolution in the DRC killed 2,280 people over nearly two years, ending in June 2020.
As of March 6, 29 cases and 13 deaths had been reported in Guinea and the DRC from the new exit, according to CDC Africa.
Late last month, the U.S. government imposed travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus by Guinea travelers.