FLICKR, CDC GLOBALThe Ebola virus still circulating in West Africa may not be the super-mutator that some researchers have thought. According to a study published this week (March 26) in Science, the virus is evolving at a rate typically seen in animals—about half as fast as estimated by a study last year.
“It hasn’t become increasingly lethal or increasingly virulent,” coauthor David Safronetz, a staff scientist for the Laboratory of Virology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told The New York Times. “The virus—it’s doing what it’s always done.”
“This is some good news for the development of interventions,” NIAID Director Anthony Fauci told NPR’s Goats and Soda. “The data also indicate it’s quite unlikely the virus will mutate and change its way of transmission.”
Last August, Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University and the Broad Institute, and her colleagues sequenced the genomes of 99 Ebola samples taken from the blood of 78 patients in Sierra Leone, identifying evidence that the virus was rapidly mutating—as much as twice as fast during the ongoing outbreak ...
