Researchers hope to find source of Ebola

Staff at Johannesburg’s National Institute for Virology (NIV) said on Monday that given the resources, they were confident they could identify the host of the deadly Ebola virus. The latest epidemic has killed at least 134 people, mainly in Uganda’s Gulu district, 360 km north of the capital Kampala. “We know lots about how Ebola spreads once it infects humans, but not much about how it is carried between outbreaks,” Professor Robert Swanepoel of the NIV told IRIN on Monday. Swanepoel, who has just returned from a 14-day research trip to Uganda, said that tracing the history of the current epidemic had proved difficult, but that there was evidence that it had been carried into Uganda either from Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). “There are troops recently returned from the DRC stationed at Gulu, some of whom have recently died of Ebola,” said Swanepoel. He added: “The disease could also have been carried from southern Sudan, possibly by rebels or gold prospectors who cross into Uganda all the time.” There are three strains of the virus that can infect humans, Ebola Sudan, first detected in Sudan in 1979, is responsible for the current epidemic in Uganda. The NIV has already completed comprehensive research on Ebola, formerly known as Marburg disease, after the town in Germany where technicians became infected in 1967 after experiments on Green Monkeys imported from the then Zaire. “It used to be thought that the virus lived in monkeys, because there have been documented cases of people falling sick after eating or even touching monkeys. But we now know that once infected, monkeys die very quickly from Ebola, so it’s unlikely that they host it,” remarked Swanepoel. He emphasised that research was now focussed on rodents and bats. “We’re pretty certain that the virus lives comfortably in bats, but now we need to find out how and why it spreads to humans,” he said. The NIV called for funding to be made available for a comprehensive research project into the origins of the Ebola virus. “The current outbreak in Gulu, where hospital staff are dying along with the sick, shows how deadly this highly-infectious disease can be in densely-populated urban areas,” Swanepoel noted. “If we can isolate the carrier, maybe we can eradicate this killer, or at least learn enough about it to develop a vaccine,” Swanepoel told IRIN. But he added that such a project would have to gather information in some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places in central Africa, including eastern DRC, where rebels are fighting to oust President Laurent-Desire Kabila as well as Uganda’s unstable northern border with Sudan. There is no medical cure for the Ebola virus, but patients who are rapidly treated to reverse dehydration have a good chance of survival. One of the main causes of Ebola transmission is the practice at traditional funerals of washing the bodies. In a bid to stem the disease, authorities in Gulu have banned such funerals and have stipulated that the bodies of victims, that remain contagious for some time after death, are not buried near homes or water supplies, Swanepoel said. The World Health Organisation, Ugandan Red Cross and the US Centre for Disease Control are all currently battling in Gulu district to treat Ebola sufferers, operate an advanced laboratory and provide health education. There have been outbreaks of Ebola in Cote D’Ivoire and Gabon, as well as Sudan Uganda and the DRC. There have been unconfirmed cases of the disease in Kenya and Tanzania. Kenya began screening Ugandans for the disease at the weekend.