
Ebola may have lingered in a survivor for 5 years before sparking new outbreak
Fox News
A person who survived the major Ebola outbreak in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 may have harbored the virus for five years before it hopped to another person and triggered the current outbreak in Guinea, according to a new analysis.
But a new analysis suggests that the Ebola virus can not only hide out for much longer than that, but it may also have the ability to spark brand-new outbreaks. To analyze the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, which has now infected 18 people and killed nine, Guinea's Ministry of Health sent three samples of the current variant to the World Health Organization's laboratory at the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal. There, researchers sequenced the samples to figure out the exact genes that make up its genome, and then they compared that with previous Ebola virus variants. They found that the current variant is very similar to the 2014 "Makona variant" that caused the West Africa outbreak in 2014 to 2016 and killed more than 11,000 people across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.More Related News













