Ebola survivors still immune to virus after 40 years

  Survivors of the world’s first known Ebola outbreak have immunity to the virus 40 years after they were infected, scientists have found. These people who beat infection in 1976 can make antibodies against Ebola today. “It’s interesting to see that after such a long time, people still have this kind of reactivity against the virus,” says virologist Stephan Becker of the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany. The findings were published online on 14 December in the Journal of Infectious Diseases1. Becker says that the discovery was “not completely unexpected”, because previous studies had found that survivors had immune responses to Ebola virus as long as 11 years after they were infected2. But until last year, no one had ever studied immunity in the survivors of the first recorded Ebola outbreak, which occurred in 1976 near the town of Yambuku, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). “Nobody even knew if these people were still alive,” says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the lead author of the latest study.See it on Scoop.it, via Viruses, Immunology & Bioinformatics from Virology.uvic.ca
Ebola survivors still immune to virus after 40 years
Source: Viral Bioinformatics