Ebola Replicating In Brain For Months

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-g ... t-34592132

Ebola caused meningitis in nurse Pauline Cafferkey

A Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola while working in West Africa is recovering well after the virus caused her to develop meningitis.
Pauline Cafferkey, 39, was readmitted to an isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London earlier this month after suffering an apparent relapse.

Health officials confirmed she had been diagnosed with meningitis caused by Ebola and had a "long recovery ahead".
Ms Cafferkey, from South Lanarkshire, contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone.

Dr Michael Jacobs, who is treating Ms Cafferkey at the Royal Free Hospital in London, said: "Pauline has become unwell by meningitis caused by the Ebola virus.
"But to be very clear about this, she hasn't been re-infected with the Ebola virus.

"This is the original Ebola virus that she had many months ago, which has been lying inside the brain, replicating at a very low level probably, and has now re-emerged to cause this clinical illness of meningitis. And this is obviously a serious thing."
Dr Jacobs said Ms Cafferkey had "became critically ill due to neurological complications from the meningitis" while being treated at the specialist isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital.

He added: "I'm really pleased to tell you that in the last few days she's made a significant improvement. She is much better now.
"I think she has a long recovery ahead of her and will be with us for quite a while still."

(continued)

[Rum]

While we are at it here's some brain eating amoeba info - just for Crumple.

http://www.webmd.com/brain/brain-eating-amoeba

[Xamonas Chegwé]

It's clearly been chomping on Scumple's frontal lobe for years. Precious little left now, poor thing.

[JimC]

I eat brains.

Lamb's brains.

[mistermack]

Maybe the experimental drugs that are used on the western health workers have the effect of helping the patient survive, but reduce the ability of the immune system to completely wipe out the virus.

If the drug is doing some of the job that the immune system normally does, it might affect the strength of the immune response.

[cronus]

Maybe the experimental drugs that are used on the western health workers have the effect of helping the patient survive, but reduce the ability of the immune system to completely wipe out the virus.

If the drug is doing some of the job that the immune system normally does, it might affect the strength of the immune response.

...or it could be the virus particles that are most adept at surviving the antiviral drugs are surviving in the brain, or eyeballs - waiting for their day? Which was mentioned in some article, which could mean there's trouble ahead? I mean they tried a whole cocktail of drugs in Africa on thousands of patients with no real aftercare in the majority of cases. And all these escape variants of Ebola will mix if the thing takes off again...

like it said here only last month....

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 091115.php

[mistermack]

That's a possibility but a slim one.
The chances are that new strains of the virus will go extinct.
It's not really a human virus, it's main carriers are bats.
A virus that kills it's host so quickly and effectively has little chance of spread, if people observe the precautions. So it can mutate all it likes in the human host, but if it doesn't jump to another human, that mutation becomes extinct with the death of the human sufferer.

As the number of new cases is down to very low levels now, it's most likely that all of the mutations that have occurred in humans will become extinct. There's no way for the virus to jump back from humans to bats so ebola is too fatal in humans for it's own good.

Now that this nurse has been identified as a carrier, they will be on the lookout for more instances.
But it wasn't full ebola disease that she suffered from this time, it was meningitis, caused by the ebola virus.
Which means that she wasn't likely to have been infectious via the usual channels of body fluids, so even if someone gets this kind of secondary infection, it's not so likely that it will lead to the survival and spread of any mutations.