Sleeping With Ebola

By Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog, Medical Discovery News When you get sick, how do you know when it's safe to come into contact with other people without spreading the infection? For many infections such as influenza, you get sick one to four days after being exposed, and you can spread the virus for an additional five to seven days after becoming sick. Now consider the importance of that timeline when it comes to a deadly virus like Ebola. The 2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been declared over, but we may need to rethink that conclusion. Ebola causes an acute illness that has a high mortality rate. People become infected, many die (up to 80 percent), but some recover. It was thought that once you survived the infection, you could not infect other people and you were immune against the virus in the future. However, we have learned that once you have become infected with the Ebola virus, you are not free of the virus when your symptoms disappear. The virus is not necessarily gone from your body and can re-emerge. Lately, a new twist in this news has significant public health implications. A Liberian woman contracted Ebola from a male sex partner, who was an Ebola survivor. The couple had sex nine months after the male was first infected with Ebola and more than 150 days after he was determined to be free of infection. Based on this clearance, the couple had unprotected sex at a point beyond the three-month waiting period currently recommended by health autho...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news