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Ebola virus can lie low and reactivate after years in human survivors

A genomic comparison of Ebola virus from the 2021 outbreak in Guinea with sequences from the West African outbreak that ended in 2016 suggests that the virus can remain latent in human survivors for an extended period of time.
  1. Robert F. Garry

    1. Robert F. Garry is in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA.

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Infection by Ebola virus can be fatal, so understanding what drives human outbreaks might offer better ways to control it. Writing in Nature, Keita et al.1 provide evidence that the 2021 outbreak of Ebola virus in Guinea, West Africa, was triggered by reactivation of an infection that had been dormant in a person without evoking symptoms. Although reawakening of such clinically latent Ebola virus infections has been observed previously, the length of the latency period — nearly five years from the end of the 2013–16 West African Ebola outbreak — is surprising. The unexpected observation that the virus can persist in the human body for such a long time has considerable implications for public health and care of survivors of Ebola.

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Nature 597, 478-480 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02378-w

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Competing Interests

The author is a co-founder of Zalgen Labs, a biotechnology company that develops countermeasures against emerging viruses, including Ebola virus.

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