Sleeplessness, along with abdominal and joint pain are common even months after recovery from the dreaded virus
ByThe data on the challenges facing Ebola survivors comes from a small survey of 81 individuals in Kenema District, Sierra Leone, who recovered from the disease. It was conducted in October 2014. Although the sample includes only a tiny fraction of the roughly who have survived the Ebola outbreak in that country, the study does provide some insights into the issues survivors are facing and reaffirm what has been seen among survivors in prior outbreaks. Lingering symptoms were seen in most survivors regardless of their sex or age, although they were generally less frequent among teenagers.
The new Sierra Leone findings, published in , are similar to those seen in of Ebola survivors in Guinea during this outbreak and to earlier anecdotal or of health issues among survivors of earlier flare-ups. Like the other works, the latest study was observational and did not include baseline data on what health issues these patients might have had before they contracted Ebola. As a result, investigators cannot know for certain that their problems stem from Ebola. Still, “despite the lack of controlled data, there are some things that appear so frequently and prominently in Ebola virus disease survivors that we feel comfortable attributing them to [Ebola],” says senior study author Daniel Bausch, a physician on WHO’s Clinical Care Team for Ebola.
Another health survey from this outbreak, which chronicled the medical issues among recent survivors of this Ebola outbreak in Guinea, included similar reports of chronic joint and muscle pain as well as eye pain and vision loss. Yet despite the many similarities across reports, researchers still do not know what to make of many of the trends. The Sierra Leone survey picked up erectile dysfunction as an issue, for example, but such sexual dysfunction is also present in any population. That leaves the question: Did Ebola prompt higher figures among survivors? It is hard to say. “We know that Ebola virus is maintained in the urogenital tract in men,” Bausch notes. Yet if the sexual dysfunction stems from a physical issue or might be more psychosocial—with men worrying about transmitting virus to their partners via their semen—is hard to pin down, he observes. Recent preliminary findings have suggested that genetic material from the virus can much longer than previously thought, but whether or not those traces of the virus are infectious and could be transmitted from person to person is not yet known. Like so many questions with Ebola, researchers are still short on answers.
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