Ebola Symptoms Absent in Some Infected Persons

A recent study shows that people can be infected with the Ebola virus and not show any symptoms. In the study, researchers from Partners in Health, which provided medical aid during the Ebola outbreak, tested 187 people in the 900-person village of Sukudu in Sierra Leone for evidence of being infected with the virus. They found that 14 had Ebola-related antibodies in their blood, which means they had been infected at some point with the virus; however, none of those 14 were included in the original 34 residents who had contracted the virus. “Because minimally symptomatic individuals were not vomiting or having diarrhea, it is highly unlikely they were a source of significant viral transmission,” said Dr. Eugene Richardson, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. “However, they still represent an instance where the health system failed to prevent human-to-human transmission of the virus.”

Ebola is highly contagious because the bodily fluids can be hard to avoid by people close to those infected. As such, the study suggests that many instances of Ebola transmission between people may have gone unidentified during the outbreak, and that Ebola has a wider variety of symptoms, which could have implications for how outbreaks are dealt with in the future.