New Ebola cases in Guinea linked to West African epidemic, raising concerns
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A genetic analysis has linked a new Ebola outbreak in Guinea to the West African Ebola epidemic that ended in 2016.
“It's been 5 years since the outbreak occurred in West Africa, and this shows us a lot about what we need to learn about the dynamics of transmission, and also further understanding how Ebola virus disease works or understand the pathogenesis of the virus,” Krutika Kuppalli, MD, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina, vice chair of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Global Health Committee, and emerging leader in biosecurity fellow at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Healio.
“We don't know if the person who got it was exposed to someone who previously had it or if maybe they had been previously infected and had a reemergence of the disease. Maybe they had a mild infection before,” Kuppalli said. “I think it shows us that there is a lot that we still need to learn about the disease, the pathogenesis and the transmission dynamics of it.”
According to a pre-publication post on Virological.org, the current outbreak was caused by the Makona strain of Zaire ebolavirus — the same one that caused the West African epidemic, which infected more than 28,000 people and killed more than 11,300 in the largest outbreak of the disease ever.
In the post, researchers reported discovering shared mutations between the virus at the center of the current outbreak and the one that caused the epidemic years ago, “mak[ing] it unlikely that the new cases are a result of a new spillover from the animal reservoir, but instead are directly linked to human cases in the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola virus disease outbreak.”
The first potential cases in the new outbreak were reported in late January, and health officials declared an outbreak shortly after. It was the first outbreak in the region since the West African epidemic.
Around the same time last month, WHO declared a separate outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Feb. 7. As of March 14, 18 cases and nine deaths have been reported in the Guinea outbreak, and 12 cases and five deaths in the DRC outbreak. According to WHO, vaccinations have been ongoing in both outbreak zones, with 3,176 people vaccinated to date in Guinea and 1,475 in the DRC.
Kuppalli said flare ups linked to past outbreaks can stir up issues among Ebola survivors.
“This has huge implications in terms of potential stigma for them. This could lead to kind of a new round of stigma if people are worried about being around people who previously had Ebola and getting it from them,” Kuppalli said. “That's something we have to think about as well and be very cognizant of. That's another reason why we need to really understand what happened here.”
Kuppalli said the results of the analysis further demonstrate just how much more research is needed on Ebola and other emerging diseases.
“There's always going to be a curveball, there's always going to be new information,” Kuppalli said. “It’s another example of why it's so important to invest in understanding these infections and why it's important to invest in developing these survivor cohorts and other similar things.”
References:
Virological.org. Guinea 2021 EBOV outbreak. https://virological.org/t/guinea-2021-ebov-outbreak/643. Accessed on March 15, 2021.
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