WASHINGTON – A single funeral caused many.
Stephen Gire and other health researchers on the ground in Africa had some hope that the Ebola outbreak was coming under control or at least plateauing in late May. Then came the funeral of a healer in Guinea. More than a dozen of the mourners contracted the disease there, probably by washing or touching the body, and took it to Sierra Leone, according to a new genetic mapping of the Ebola virus that scientists hope will help them understand what makes this killer tick.
“You had this huge burst after it looked like the outbreak was starting to die down,” Gire said. “It sort of threw a wrench in the response.”
Ebola exploded after that funeral and has now killed at least 1,550 people in West Africa. It’s probably more than that, with 40 percent of the cases in the last three weeks, according to the World Health Organization. WHO officials said last week the outbreak continues to accelerate and could reach more than 20,000 cases eventually.
Gire and more than 50 colleagues – five of whom died from Ebola while fighting the outbreak in Africa – have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola and in so doing showed how crucial that May funeral was. Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute, and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study, published in the journal Science, that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients.
The virus has mutated more than 300 times from previous strains of Ebola, Gire said. Researchers have also pinpointed about 50 places in the genetic code where the virus has changed since this outbreak started. So far, they don’t know what any of those mutations mean, but they hope to find out.
Gire said it is mutating in the faster side of the normal range for viruses of its type.
That becomes worrisome because as time goes on and the disease spreads, it gives the strain more opportunity to mutate into something even harder to fight, perhaps making it stronger or easier to spread, Sabeti said. It could also mutate to make it weaker.
