Thursday, December 12, 2019

Worrisome "Uptick" In Ebola Cases -- After Relief Efforts Suspended Due To Intensifying Factional Violence In DRC...


The graphic tells essentially the entire story [worth "a thousand words, indeed"] -- of the effect of renewed violence against health workers in the DRC: more people will die -- of Ebola. Probably for a few months now.

But the second, deeper worry, now is that seventeen of the new cases are from a person who had -- it was thought -- survived the viral infection once already. As such, it would be expected that the recovering person had acquired immunity [they were never vaccinated, however]. Certainly more study is needed, tout de suite -- if people with purely natural "acquired" immunity are, in fact, re-infection risks.

Here's a link to the whole WHO update report as published tonight, and a bit:

. . . .The majority of these new cases are linked to a single chain of transmission, in which one individual was a potential source of infection for 17 people. This is the second documentation of EVD illness in this individual within a 6-month period. An investigation is ongoing to understand the circumstances around this case. Among the possibilities being investigated are reinfection and relapse. Reinfection would mean a person who has recovered from EVD is infected with EVD from another person; there has never been a documented case of this. Rare cases of relapse have been documented, in which a person who has recovered from EVD gets disease symptoms again.

In the past week, there were six new cases among health workers; five of which were traditional practitioners, bringing the total number of health workers infected in this outbreak to 169 (5% of all reported cases). . . .


As ever, we are keeping a very close watch on this viral storm, at the horizon line. . . be excellent to one another.

नमस्ते

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