Sunday, January 15, 2017
People walking past a billboard with a message about Ebola in Freetown on November 7, 2014. An estimated 17,000 survived the most recent outbreak. PHOTO | AFP
PARIS
People who survive Ebola may still battle debilitating health problems a year after being declared infection-free, according to an ongoing trial in Guinea, which highlighted the need for patient follow-up.
Three-quarters of survivors had post-Ebola symptoms when they enrolled for the trial about a year, on average, after they were discharged from hospital, researchers reported.
Eighteen per cent experienced eye problems, including eight individuals who went blind, a team wrote in the Lancet Infectious Diseases. Two per cent were deaf.
This is the largest and longest-running assessment of Ebola survivors to date.
Nearly one in four participants suffered joint and muscle pain, 35 per cent had headaches and 22 per cent stomach pain when they enrolled.
Seventeen per cent had depression symptoms.
The study also confirmed previous observations that the virus can remain in the semen of infected men for 18 months or longer, raising the spectre of sexual transmission.
The team recruited 802 survivors between the ages of one and 79 from four hospitals in Guinea between March 2015 and July 2016.
Together, the group represented 74 per cent of Guinean survivors of the 2013-16 epidemic in west Africa — by far the worst outbreak in the disease’s 40-year history.
Some 11,300 people died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, compared to 1,700 worldwide in the preceding four decades.
An estimated 17,000 survived the most recent outbreak.
“The high number of survivors has raised new issues: long-term clinical complications, psycho-social consequences, risks of Ebola virus disease reactivation and secondary transmission due to viral persistence in body fluids,” the authors of the study wrote.
They conducted analysis of blood, semen, breast milk, urine and saliva at regular intervals, as well as psychological examinations.