New STD!

Formerly known as ebola.  For those not keeping up, Liberia was declared free of Ebola in May 2015.  In early July 2015 a young man in a village near Monrovia died and was found post mortem to be positive.  This is slightly mysterious as he had no travel history to Guinea or Sierrra Leone, where the epidemic continues, and had no contact with travelers from those areas.  Five of his two hundred contacts are now positive, but there have been no new diagnoses for about a week, so this chain of transmission seems to have ended. (Update, turned out to be six cases, four survived).

So, where did this kid aquire the virus?  It was initially hypothesized it was from a dog he and his friends cooked and ate - Dog on a Log anyone?   The dog remains were actually tested, and found to be negative, but that's a whole nother story..  The patients virus has been sequenced (the viral genome has been analyzed) and does not match the genetics of currently circulating virus. It does however match the virus that was circulating in Monrovia last summer.

This is where it gets crazy.  Our bodies have sites of immune privilege, places where antibodies and such don't go.  Pretty much that's your eyes, yer brain (if ya have one), and yer man parts.  You don't want your immune system killing stuff in these areas, it would not bode well for us as a species.  It's been suspected, and there is evidence, that ebolavirus can remain in these places long after recovery.  In Lassa and West Nile persistent virus had been documented years after acute illness.

Earlier this year a fellow treated here in the states developed eye pain and inflammation, and apparently his eye color changed - this occurred months after recovery.  His ophthalmologist stuck a needle in and found Ebola.  Wanna bet that clinic got real clean, real fast?  This was culturable virus, not just detected by PCR.  It was also recovered in semen.

Since it's unlikely our kid In Liberia ate eyeballs or brains, that leaves sex. Now that there are thousands of male survivors walking around harboring ebolavirus in their semen, it seems unlikely this outbreak will be contained any time soon.