A new study suggests the origin of the worldwide Ebola outbreak was a two-year- old African boy who passed away last year. Image: Festa/Shutterstock A toddler in Africa may have started the Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organisation has now delcared an international public health emergency, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The two-year-old boy identified as Patient Zero died on 6 December 2013 in a village in Guéckédou in southeastern Guinea in Africa. The region borders Sierra Leone and Liberia, making it an ideal entry point for an epidemic. There have since been at least 1,779 cases of the disease, as Denise Grady and Sheri Fink explain in The New York Times, and 961 deaths - including the boys mother, sister and grandmother. At the time of their deaths, no one was sure what had sickened the family, despite the fever, vomiting and diarrhoea characteristic of the disease, so no special procedures were put into place when it came to treating them. And, within a few weeks, the study shows that contaminated healthcare workers who had supported the family and mourners at their funerals then spread the disease to surrounding villages and hospitals. By early March it had appeared across southern Guinea. Cases have now been reported in Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The international team of researchers managed to trace the diseases origins by looking at the way the new strain spread through Africa. Although the toddler and his family were never officially diagnosed with Ebola, their symptoms match the disease and, according to The New York Times, fit into a pattern of transmission that included other cases confirmed by blood tests. However, the scientists still arent sure how the boy would have caught Ebola in the first place. Sylvain Baize, part of the team that analysed the Guinea outbreak and a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Lyon, France, told Grady and Fink at The New York Times that there might have been an earlier undiscovered case prior to the young boy. “We suppose that the first case was infected following contact with bats,” Blaize said. “Maybe, but we are not sure.” So how did this Ebola outbreak get so out of control, when weve generally been able to get a hold of them quite quickly in the past? Grady and Fink explain its a combination of a lack of infrastructure and hygiene, increased travel and modernisation in Africa, and the fact that healthcare workers in West Africa simply werent prepared to deal with the disease, and didnt know the symptoms.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 15:08:11 +0000
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