In a sign of the urgency and danger at hand, five of the nearly 60 international co-authors who helped collect and analyze the viral samples have died of Ebola, said the report in the journal Science.
More than 1,552 people have been killed and 3,000 infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria according to the World Health Organization’s latest toll.
Never before has there been an Ebola outbreak so large, nor has the virus — which was first detected in 1976 — ever infected people in West Africa until now.
“We’ve uncovered more than 300 genetic clues about what sets this outbreak apart from previous outbreaks,” said Stephen Gire, a research scientist in the Sabeti lab at the Broad Institute and Harvard University.
“Although we don’t know whether these differences are related to the severity of the current outbreak, by sharing these data with the research community, we hope to speed up our understanding of this epidemic and support global efforts to contain it.”
- How the virus spreads -
Ebola spreads through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected people when they are showing symptoms, such as fever, vomiting and diarrhea.
It can also be contagious after a person dies, and health officials have warned that touching corpses during funeral rites can be a key route of transmission.
Researchers took samples of the virus from 78 patients in Sierra Leone during the first few weeks of the outbreak there.
They released 99 sequences, because they sampled some of the patients twice to show how the virus could evolve in a single person.
Among those studied were two dozen people who attended the funeral of a traditional healer who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea, became ill and died of the virus.
The mourners included a young pregnant woman from nearby Sierra Leone. Soon after, she was hospitalized with a fever and miscarried.
She survived, and became Sierra Leone’s first confirmed case of Ebola in the outbreak that swept West Africa.
Researchers said they believe the virus spread via an animal host, possibly a kind of fruit bat that has a natural range from central Africa — where Ebola has caused human outbreaks before — to Guinea in the continent’s far west.
The Sierra Leone outbreak has been linked to the emergence of two distinct viruses that probably came from Guinea, the journal Science said.
A report in the New England Journal of Medicine in April said the first known case of the West Africa outbreak was believed to be a young child who died December 6, 2013 in Guinea.
“According to the current state of the epidemiologic investigation, the
suspected first case of the outbreak was a two-year-old child who died in Meliandou, in Gueckedou prefecture,” said the NEJM study.
Some researchers believe the child may have come in contact with an infected fruit bat, though that theory has not been proven.
Culled from Vanguard
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