The two Americans being treated for Ebola at Emory University Hospital have a chance at full recovery, and experts say they know of no cases in which a recovered patient has infected someone else with the virus.
“If they are cured, they are cured,” said Dr. Omer Pasi, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Transmission after someone is cured is completely unheard of.”
Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the missionaries to Liberia who contracted Ebola while treating people stricken with the virus there, may have been significantly weakened by the disease. But if both survive their infections, they could return to their normal activities one day.
Whether a surviving patient suffers long-term effects from Ebola may depend on the progress of the disease before the patient begins producing antibodies to fight it.
Dr. Amar Safdar, director of transplant infectious diseases at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, said studies of previous outbreaks have found that a minority of survivors experience chronic joint pain and an eye condition called uveitis, which can lead to blindness if left untreated. In addition, some patients have remained anemic and take some time for bone marrow and scalp hair loss to recover.
Knowledge of Ebola is still limited, notes Dr. Alexander van Tulleken, a humanitarian aid physician at Fordham University.
“There haven’t been a huge number of Ebola cases in all of human history,” van Tulleken said. “We haven’t got huge quantities of all of the human fluids where we can detect and see if the virus persists.”
He echoes Dr. Safdar, however, in saying he’d have no hesitation about shaking the hand of someone who had recovered from Ebola.
It’s possible, Safdar said, that men will retain the virus for a time in their reproductive organs. According to the CDC, they may be capable of infecting someone else for up to three months through sexual contact.
‘Their fight is far from over’
Meanwhile, from his isolation unit at Emory, Brantly said Friday he is “recovering in every way.”
“There are still a few hurdles to clear before I can be discharged, but I hold on to the hope of a sweet reunion with my wife, children and family in the near future,” Brantly said, according to a statement distributed by Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian charity he works for.
“Thank you for your prayers for Nancy and me. Please continue to pray for and bring attention to those suffering in the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa. Their fight is far from over.”
That is true even for those in West Africa who survive Ebola. The virus kills most people it infects, but it also marks the people who, against the odds, manage to survive. The social stigma that attaches to an Ebola infection can be intense.
In Guinea for example, the Associated Press reported that Kadiatou Fanta, a 26-year-old medical student, has been shunned by her university, boyfriend and family because she once had the disease.
Dr. Pasi, the CDC epidemiologist, is also president of the Congolese community in Atlanta. The first known outbreaks of Ebola occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1976 and were named after the Ebola River. Those outbreaks and another in Congo in 1995 killed hundreds of people. But there, in central Africa, survivors seemed to take it in stride.
“I went back and visited there in 1996 and 1997 and met with seven people who had been cured of Ebola. They were having normal lives and were back at work,” Pasi said. “Others were going about their life as well. It was completely normal and the only time people recalled it is when I called them about it.”
‘Our culture is to talk and hug’
Pasi and others say the likelihood of an American outbreak is extremely low. The key now is containing it in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three countries hardest-hit. Nearly a dozen cases also have been recorded in Nigeria, which lies hundreds of miles to the east of the three countries where the outbreaks are raging.
Soji Olawale hasn’t been home to Nigeria in at least three years. Aside from his wife and a few in-laws in Boston, his whole family is in the capitol city of Lagos.
But Olawale is worried about going back.
“I’m concerned, because as you travel throughout the country, you have to talk to people. You have to be with people,” Olawale explained. “This disease is being transmitted through the bodily fluids. Our culture is to talk to and hug our people.”
Morlaye Camara, finance manager for the Atlanta-based International Rescue Committee, wants to visit his father in Guinea, but other relatives there are warning him off.
“Anytime I call, my brother, who is a doctor, tells me it is dangerous,” said Camara. “I wanted to go home for vacation, but I could not go. They told me not to come. They don’t want me to come, because you don’t know who is sick.”
‘I advise any American not to go’
Camara also has a keen distrust of the government and believes the West African governments were ill-equipped to handle the epidemic and now it is too late.
“For political reasons they were hiding this disease,” he said. “People are not aware of the dangers of Ebola. They don’t know, because people are not talking about it. The only agency that can talk about it is the government and the government is not talking about it. The president doesn’t want people to know that he is not handling this properly.”
Camara has tried to get his father, who is 87 and has cancer, to come to Atlanta.
“But he doesn’t want to fly,” Camara said. “And if people ask me, I will advise any American citizen not to go. I don’t even want to go now.”
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