Twelve of them said they had had no symptoms of the disease, which typically causes fever, unexplained bleeding, headache, muscle pain, rash, vomiting, diarrhoea, breathing problems and difficulty swallowing. Of these, 14 were found to be carrying antibodies to Ebola, indicating they had been infected at some point, though they had not been included in the original count. The researchers then recruited 187 men, women and children from Sukudu who had likely been exposed to Ebola, either because they were living in the same household or had shared a public toilet with a person confirmed to have had the disease. Richardson said the test proved to be a reasonable measure of viral antibodies. They first made sure the test was accurate by comparing results from 30 Ebola survivors in Sukudu with those of 132 people in other villages where the virus had not been reported. They used a test known as the ELISA assay, a technique that can detect the presence of an antibody. He worked with a local physician and two community health workers in gathering data for the study, a process that was approved by the local village chief. In the aftermath, Richardson and his colleagues decided to go back to the village to try to determine whether the Ebola infection could be minimally symptomatic, as previous studies have suggested. More than 11,000 people are estimated to have died because of the disease. More than 28,000 cases of Ebola infection were reported in Africa during the epidemic, the largest and longest in history. There were 34 reported cases of Ebola in the village, including 28 deaths. The village, with about 900 residents, had been one of three major hot spots in the Kono District, in the eastern part of the country, during the heat of the Ebola crisis between November 2014 and February 2015. The research was done in the rural village of Sukudu in Sierra Leone, a country where Richardson and his colleagues cared for hundreds of patients in Ebola treatment units managed by Partners In Health. Richardson is lead author of the study, and Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, a Harvard professor and director of Partners In Health, is the senior author. 14 at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s annual meeting in Atlanta. This shows there was a lot more human-to-human transmission than we thought.” It also means a significant portion of transmission events may have gone undetected during the outbreak. “It provides important evidence on that front.
“The study corroborates previous evidence that Ebola is like most other viruses in that it causes a spectrum of manifestations, including minimally symptomatic infection,” Richardson said. Based on the results of the study, the researchers calculated the prevalence of minimally symptomatic infection to be 25 percent. The findings also suggest that the epidemic was more widespread than previously believed. The research confirms previous suspicions that the Ebola virus does not uniformly cause severe disease, and that people may be infected without showing signs of illness, said Gene Richardson, MD, a former fellow in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford who is now a PhD candidate in anthropology at the university. Yet 12 said they had had no symptoms during the time of active transmission in the village.
These individuals had antibodies to the virus, indicating they had been infected at one time. A year after the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine and other institutions identified 14 individuals previously unknown to have had the disease in a Sierra Leone village that was an Ebola hot spot.
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