In horrifying news, the first case of Ebola being sexually transmitted has just been reported, resulting in the death of a 44-year-old Liberian woman in March this year.
She and a male Liberian Ebola survivor – who had tested negative to the disease via several blood tests, the last of which took place all the way back in October 2014 – had unprotected sex on March 7 this year. She contracted Ebola, and died just 15 days later.
After her death, the survivor voluntarily provided his blood and semen for testing. His blood once again came back negative, yet his semen tested positive.
According to The New England Journal of Medicine, which reported on the woman’s death, Ebola is only detectable in the bloodstream during acute illness. However, it can linger in the body for much longer, and has been found in breast milk up to 15 days after onset, in vaginal secretions up to 33 days, in aqueous humour – a.k.a. eye juice – up to 98 days, and in semen up to 101 days. (In this case, the survivor had last tested negative to Ebola a full 155 days before sexual intercourse.)
Yet sexual transmissions of Ebola are a rare event, says a Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor who specialises in hemorrhagic fevers and has worked extensively with Ebola sufferers in Liberia.
“Finding Ebola virus RNA in semen does not imply that it is infectious, and they are carrying out further testing to look for active virus in the specimens,” says Dr Ardman Sprecher. “There are more than 17,000 survivors of this EVD outbreak, approximately half of whom are male. Most of these male survivors are nearly one year into their convalescence. If sexual transmission from survivors were an important means of disease propagation, we would have seen a number of cases by now.”
Liberia was declared to be free of Ebola for the second time on September 3 this year, after 4,808 deaths and 10,672 reported cases.
“Let us not forget that survivors have already endured a painful severe illness, and many emerge from it to find that friends and family members have died,” says Dr Sprecher. “If they are then treated as pariahs and threats, we add a terrible unkindness on top of their suffering.”
“They should be treated with all the compassion we can muster.”
Picture: John Moore via Getty Images.
