Antibody Spike Months After Ebola Infection Surprisingly Common

A study of people in Sierra Leone suggests that the virus can lie in hiding from the immune system before re-emerging later and sparking a new response—although researchers didn’t examine whether this could make people infectious again.

Written byCatherine Offord

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ABOVE: An Ebola survivor donates plasma at the blood bank at Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
JANET SCOTT

Asubstantial proportion of people who survive Ebola may produce a spike in antibody levels more than six months after they’ve recovered from the disease, according to a study published today (January 27) in Nature.

Analyzing multiple plasma samples from 51 survivors of the West African outbreak of 2013–2016, researchers found that the levels of virus-neutralizing antibodies declined, as expected, in the days and weeks following recovery. But these levels shot up again in some survivors around the 200- to 300-day mark before declining again—evidence that Ebola virus may be lingering inside their bodies and re-emerging to trigger immune defenses, the researchers conclude in their paper.

“The idea that there can be a source of virus that could restimulate the immune system isn’t surprising” in itself, says Carl Davis, an immunologist at Emory ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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