WIKIMEDIA, NEPHRONAfter an Ebola patient has recovered from the infection and her blood is virus-free, Ebola can still linger, hiding out—and sometimes replicating— for months in the immunoprivileged tissues of the body, including the eye, the placenta, and the brain.
“The only possible way that we could surmise that the virus could be present is that it was seeded from the acute original infection and persisted,” Daniel Bausch, who researches emerging pathogens at Tulane University in New Orleans and who worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) during the West African Ebola epidemic, told The Scientist. “We have very ample and increasing evidence that the virus can persist in some of these sites.”
Now researchers are trying to understand how Ebola survives in these tissues—and how to knock out the virus for good, though Bausch emphasizes that the evidence suggests Ebola will eventually disappear on its own. “It’s just that these are sites where it’s harder for your immune system to get into and so ...
